RX Vega 56 launched in August 2017 with a blower-style stock cooler that is incapable of adequately handling the excess heat from this GPU at its full performance level. The default settings deliberately limit the power consumption and fan speed to keep it running comfortably within its physical limitations. Can it be improved with a different GPU cooler?
RX Vega 56: Laptop versus Server
AMD’s RX Vega 56 GPU is good for more than just cryptocurrency mining. It can produce impressive visuals and high frame rates in the latest PC games when used in an appropriate gaming PC with at least 16 GB RAM and a 4 GHz multi-core CPU like the i7-8700K or Ryzen 7 1700X.
Instead, I’m going to see how well it performs in two inappropriate systems: an ultra-portable laptop, and a dual-socket rack server.
#Infosec
Another list of recent news items about computer security, privacy, and surveillance.
Accelerated R with CUDA on Linux
The R programming language uses Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) for performing common linear algebra operations such as vector addition, scalar multiplication, dot products, linear combinations, and matrix multiplication. R includes Netlib BLAS by default. Significant performance gains can be achieved by replacing that with a different BLAS library such as OpenBLAS or ATLAS.
Further gains are possible by intercepting certain calls to BLAS with NVIDIA’s NVBLAS. Operations that can benefit from running on a GPU will be automatically redirected to cuBLAS without any modification to your R code.
AKiTiO Node Thunderbolt 3 eGFX Box
The AKiTiO Node is a 7Kg black metal powered external enclosure for connecting a full-size graphical processing unit (GPU) to any computer with a Thunderbolt 3 port. The front 12cm fan can be removed to make room for a water cooling radiator. The carry handle helps it to be more portable than a full tower PC, although it is bigger in real life than it seems in photos.
Scientific consensus: Earth’s climate is warming
NOTE: This is a mirror of the page climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus on 2016-12-16, posted here for safe keeping.
Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals1 show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position. The following is a partial list of these organizations, along with links to their published statements and a selection of related resources.
Continue reading Scientific consensus: Earth’s climate is warming
Internet Surveillance News
TCCON
The Total Carbon Column Observing Network (TCCON) is a global network of instruments that measure the amount of carbon dioxide, methane, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide and other trace gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. There are two TCCON instruments in Australia: Darwin and Wollongong (and one nearby in Lauder, New Zealand).
Visualising OCO-2 XCO2 in R with DeltaRho
NASA JPL’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) was launched into sun-synchronous orbit around the Earth on July 2, 2014. It carries 3 grated spectrometers for measuring the spectrum of sunlight reflected off the surface of the earth, which is used to calculate the average concentration of Carbon Dioxide in the column of atmosphere beneath the satellite (XCO2). It takes 16 days to provide full coverage of the Earth’s surface.
I am using the R packages datadr and Trelliscope from the DeltaRho project (formerly called Tessera.io) to explore and visualise the XCO2 observations from the OCO-2 Level 2 Lite version 7R data product.
Installing every CRAN package in R on CentOS 7
Step 1: Install CentOS 7 Linux.
Some R packages will not install without an active X window session, so if you are not logged in to a graphical interface on the machine you will need to connect via SSH with X-forwarding enabled, such as with PuTTY and VcXsrv on Windows.
Most of this guide must be run from the Linux terminal as the user who will be running R. That user must be allowed to run commands as root with sudo.
Continue reading Installing every CRAN package in R on CentOS 7