Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (September 1st, 2018)
Our PCs and servers run x64 processors, most of them made by Intel and AMD. In my home, all my x64 processors are made by Intel… except the processor of my PlayStation...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Lexicographical comparisons vs. equality checks: the long-string case
It is a common problem in software to check whether two pieces of data are byte-by-byte identical. Standard libraries provide function to compute a lexicographical...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
AVX-512 throttling: heavy instructions are maybe not so dangerous
Recent Intel processors have fancy instructions operating over 512-bit registers. They are reported to cause a frequency throttling of the core where they are run...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (August 24th, 2018)
There is water on the surface of the Moon. This is important because if you want to build a long-term base on the Moon, having access to water is a great asset....
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Trying harder to make AVX-512 look bad: my quantified and reproducible results
Intel’s latest processors have fancy instructions part of the AVX-512 family. The AVX-512 instructions are useful for numerical work and sophisticated computing...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Avoid lexicographical comparisons when testing for string equality
By default, programmers like to compare their bytes and strings using a lexicographical order. “Lexicographical” is a fancy word for “dictionary order”. That is...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Performance of ranged accesses into arrays: modulo, multiply-shift and masks
Suppose that you wish to access values in an array of size n, but instead of having indexes in [0,n), you have arbitrary non-negative integers. This sort of problems...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (August 19th, 2018)
Publishing your ideas is a central component of science and scholarship. To make it easier to publish, some companies and organizations have begun to offer pay-to...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The dangers of AVX-512 throttling: a 3% impact
Intel’s latest processors come with powerful new instructions from the AVX-512 family. These instructions operate over 512-bit registers. They use more power than...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast strongly universal 64-bit hashing everywhere!
In software, hashing is the process of taking a value and mapping it to a random-looking value. Suppose you are given 64-bit integers (a long in Java). You might...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The dangers of AVX-512 throttling: myth or reality?
Modern processors use many tricks to go faster. They are superscalar which means that they can execute many instructions at once. They are multicore, which means...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (August 10th, 2018)
There are far fewer forest fires now than there was 15 years ago. The Earth is getting greener. There are more forests: We show that—contrary to the prevailingContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (August 4th, 2018)
About 80% of the ocean remains unmapped and unexplored. Even a mild concussion (a fall on your head) can double your risk of dementia (e.g., Alzheimer’s). Apple...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Getting 4 bytes or a full cache line: same speed or not?
Many software operations are believed to be “memory bound”, meaning that the processor spins empty while waiting for data to come from memory. To compensate, our...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 27th, 2018)
It is frequently argued that intelligence requires great complexity. But complex compared to what? To put things in perspective, my friend Leonid points out that...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Writing about software and building software are different jobs
Code taken from a blog post is meant to illustrate an idea. Blogging is literature, not engineering. Don’t build production systems by copying and pasting random...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
It is more complicated than I thought: -mtune, -march in GCC
My favourite C compilers are GNU GCC and LLVM’s Clang. In C, you compile for some architecture. Thus you have to tell the compiler what kind of machine you have...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Are vectorized random number generators actually useful?
Our processors benefit from “SIMD” instructions. These instructions can operate on several values at once, thus greatly accelerating some algorithms. Earlier, I...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 21st, 2018)
It seems that something called “Cartesian Genetic Programming” could be a match for Deep Learning. If you look at the best paid individuals in most fields, most...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog