• Adapting Models to the Real World: On-Device Training for Edge Model Adaptation

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    Neural networks are becoming widely used in computer interaction, but in real-world scenarios we see errors. We’ve recently completed research into edge distillation to solve this problem.
    • July 15, 2020
  • Deep Learning Episode 4: Supercomputer vs Pong II

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    It looks like DeepMind-level performance is within our grasp! I took a quick look to see how our 90-core cloud run looks under a profiler
    • October 20, 2016
  • Deep Learning Episode 3: Supercomputer vs Pong

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    This spring my attention was caught by another interesting result: using a new approach they were able to beat Atari Pong in just 2 hours of training time on a single node by parallelizing the work into…
    • October 19, 2016
  • Deep Learning Episode 2: Scaling TensorFlow over multiple EC2 GPU nodes

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    Not everybody has access to an Infiniband-backed supercomputer, but anyone can launch a fleet of EC2 GPU instances for a few dollars per hour. Can we get similar speedups in the cloud? I decided to find…
    • August 3, 2016
  • Deep Learning Episode 1: Optimizing DeepMind's A3C on Torch

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    In February, a new paper from Google's DeepMind team appeared on arxiv. This one was interesting – they showed dramatically improved performance and training time of their Atari-playing Deep Q-Learning…
    • June 3, 2016
  • Writing a MAP Custom Metric: PAPI IPC

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    Arm MAP isn't just a lightweight profiler to help you optimize your code. It also lets you add your own metrics with just a couple of lines of code.
    • April 21, 2016
  • Advanced Memory Debugger and Memory Leak Detection for C++, C and F90 Applications

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    The memory debugger in Arm DDT assists in fixing a number of common memory usage errors with C, C++ and Fortran codes on Linux.
    • February 11, 2016
  • Fixing Dangling Pointers

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    Dangling pointers are pointers whose memory has been freed but which have not been set to null (or 0x0). This allows a particularly tricky class of bug to arise...
    • December 22, 2015
  • Profiling and Tuning Linpack: A Step-by-Step Guide

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    I expected a very straightforward tuning process – after all, this code has been a staple of the HPC community for decades – but as it turns out I was in for a surprise!
    • October 21, 2015
  • Optimizing Discovar - Part 2: Running in the cloud on Amazon EC2

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    In Part 1 I ran Discovar, a life sciences genome assembly code, on one of our internal systems and optimized it to run the benchmark code 7% faster. Of course, physical hardware often performs very differently…
    • August 18, 2015
  • Profiling OpenMP with Arm MAP 5.0

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    We're going to see what Arm MAP 5.0 can do by profiling three versions of a simple PI calculator program with some added I/O for good fun
    • February 3, 2015
  • Tuning bowtie2 for better performance

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    Recently we've been running bowtie2 on a 16 CPU server with 32 GB RAM. I've tried using the “-p” flag to use more cores but it doesn't seem to make a lot of difference after 8 or so.
    • January 10, 2015
  • CUDA Debugger and Profiler - Advanced Debugging and Performance Optimization Tools for CUDA and OpenACC

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    Arm Forge is a development tool suite for developing, debugging and optimizing CUDA and OpenACC codes - from GeForce to Tesla and the Kepler K80.
    • November 25, 2014
  • Detecting Memory Leaks

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    Memory leaks are a killer of long running applications - memory usage keeps growing until finally the memory supply is exhausted and it's "game over". If you’re lucky the system recognizes your application…
    • August 24, 2012
  • Tool up with Arm DDT

    Mark O'Connor
    Mark O'Connor
    We humans can survive in almost every environment on our planet and are beginning to step off it. We command fire hotter than the core of a star and freeze atoms at temperatures cooler than the depths…
    • December 2, 2011