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dpe82 commented on macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt   developer.apple.com/docum... · Posted by u/guiand
wmf · 2 days ago
That's how Groq works. A cluster of LPUv2s would probably be faster and cheaper than an Infiniband cluster of Epycs.
dpe82 · 2 days ago
Yeah I'm familiar; I was hoping I could do something related on previous generation commodity(ish) hardware. It didn't work but I learned a ton.
dpe82 commented on macOS 26.2 enables fast AI clusters with RDMA over Thunderbolt   developer.apple.com/docum... · Posted by u/guiand
awnihannun · 2 days ago
For a bit more context, those posts are using pipeline parallelism. For N machines put the first L/N layers on machine 1, next L/N layers on machine 2, etc. With pipeline parallelism you don't get a speedup over one machine - it just buys you the ability to use larger models than you can fit on a single machine.

The release in Tahoe 26.2 will enable us to do fast tensor parallelism in MLX. Each layer of the model is sharded across all machines. With this type of parallelism you can get close to N-times faster for N machines. The main challenge is latency since you have to do much more frequent communication.

dpe82 · 2 days ago
> The main challenge is latency since you have to do much more frequent communication.

Earlier this year I experimented with building a cluster to do tensor parallelism across large cache CPUs (AMD EPYC 7773X have 768mb of L3). My thought was to keep an entire model in SRAM and take advantage of the crazy memory bandwidth between CPU cores and their cache, and use Infiniband between nodes for the scatter/gather operations.

Turns out the sum of intra-core latency and PCIe latency absolutely dominate. The Infiniband fabric is damn fast once you get data to it, but getting it there quickly is a struggle. CXL would help but I didn't have the budget for newer hardware. Perhaps modern Apple hardware is better for this than x86 stuff.

dpe82 commented on Is it a bubble?   oaktreecapital.com/insigh... · Posted by u/saigrandhi
dpe82 · 4 days ago
A take I saw recently is: if people are still asking "are we in a bubble" then we are not yet in a bubble.
dpe82 commented on NVIDIA frenemy relation with OpenAI and Oracle   philippeoger.com/pages/de... · Posted by u/jeanloolz
dhosek · 6 days ago
The similarity in names is likely to Groq’s detriment.
dpe82 · 6 days ago
Maybe, but they'd been operating under that name for 7 years before Elon came along and decided he needed a name for his model.
dpe82 commented on Google Titans architecture, helping AI have long-term memory   research.google/blog/tita... · Posted by u/Alifatisk
swatcoder · 7 days ago
Do you think there might be an approval process to navigate when experiments costs might run seven or eight digits and months of reserved resources?

While they do have lots of money and many people, they don't have infinite money and specifically only have so much hot infrastructure to spread around. You'd expect they have to gradually build up the case that a large scale experiment is likely enough to yield a big enough advantage over what's already claiming those resources.

dpe82 · 7 days ago
I would imagine they do not want their researchers unnecessarily wasting time fighting for resources - within reason. And at Google, "within reason" can be pretty big.
dpe82 commented on Touching the Elephant – TPUs   considerthebulldog.com/tt... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
mr_toad · 8 days ago
> Wrt invading Taiwan, I don't think there is any way China can get TSMC intact.

There are so many trade and manufacturing links between China and Taiwan that an outright war would be economically disastrous for both countries.

dpe82 · 8 days ago
That doesn't mean they won't try anyway; political ideology often trumps rational planning.
dpe82 commented on The Forgotten Roman Ruins of the ‘Pompeii of the Middle East’   news.artnet.com/art-world... · Posted by u/pseudolus
dpe82 · 9 days ago
It's not even noon and I've already thought about ancient Rome today!
dpe82 commented on IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off   businessinsider.com/ibm-c... · Posted by u/nabla9
PunchyHamster · 12 days ago
Just not too old. Easy to get into "power usage makes it not worth it" for any use case when it runs 24/7
dpe82 · 12 days ago
Maybe? The price difference on newer hardware can buy a lot of electricity, and if you aren't running stuff at 100% all the time the calculation changes again. Idle power draw on a brand new server isn't significantly different from one that's 5 years old.
dpe82 commented on Why Strong Consistency?   brooker.co.za/blog/2025/1... · Posted by u/SchwKatze
awesome_dude · 17 days ago
Again - the viewer rarely cares when that happens

Minor annoyance, maybe, rage quit the application? Not a chance.

dpe82 · 17 days ago
Your users must be very different from the ones I'm familiar with.
dpe82 commented on Why Strong Consistency?   brooker.co.za/blog/2025/1... · Posted by u/SchwKatze
awesome_dude · 17 days ago
If the video is streaming, people don't really care if a few frames drop, hell, most won't notice.

It's only when several frames in a row are dropped that people start to notice, and even then they rarely care as long as the message within the video has enough data points for them to make an (educated) guess.

dpe82 · 17 days ago
P/B frames (which is usually most of them) reference other frames to compress motion effectively. So losing a packet doesn't mean a dropped frame, it means corruption that lasts until the next I-frame/slice. This can be seconds. If you've ever seen corrupt video that seems to "smear" wrong colors, etc. across the screen for a bunch of frames, that's what we're talking about here.

u/dpe82

KarmaCake day1662January 30, 2011
About
Hacking the AIs.

Previously: - YouTube: - Shorts: founding engineer and infrastructure lead - Stories: infrastructure engineer - Uploads: Android TL - Vidmaker (acquired): founder/engineer (browser-based video editor) - Sony Vegas: engineer (desktop video editor) - WI state senate: legislative staffer - Various: LAMP stack hacker back when P was for Perl

Wisconsin native.

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