more than a few
Even though I am well into my first draft of my research paper for this semester, the analysis is not complete. It took me practically all semester to acquire the data necessary and to foster an incredible patience to handle the monotony of experiments. Now, I have gigabytes of data ready to go… with a few hurdles remaining that I had never imagined. Without diving into the nuts & bolts of “natural hearing restoration” or “transparent hearing”, my code is selecting the best microphone locations for surface-mounting to a specific headset in order to recreate the ear’s natural hearing as best as possible. But, I have 48 locations. Luckily, I am only considering 24 of them. And, luckily, due to common processing limitations, 4 microphones is considered optimal. So, this means that the number of possible microphone combinations is (and you can’t have the same microphone present twice):
24 * 23 * 22 * 21 = 255,024.
Awesome. Unfortunately, my workstation in the lab takes about 20 seconds to process each iteration. That means 255,024 * 20 / 60 / 60 = 1,417 CPU-hours. My iMac here, at home, requires about 404 CPU-hours to finish the job (dual-core can do more, apparently). But, I have about one week, or 192 hours, to get this optimum microphone combination selected for my report. Hmmm.
I made a request for help and got a great reply. Something like “we have a bunch of new Xserves just sitting here… want to use one?” Once I recovered from the painful impact my jaw suffered from dropping so fast, I did some email tag and we are setting up the whole routine tomorrow. Some quick calculations say that the Xserve has four total cores and my process is multi-threaded (thankfully). My iMac has two cores, so take that number and divide by two… 202 CPU-hours. But, the Xserve has 2.66 GHz processors whereas my iMac has 2.16GHz processors. So, that means an increase in performance by about 20%, give-or-take, leading to … 155 CPU-hours.
155 is less than 192. Awesome. This could work.
December 6th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
i’m still so jealous of your snow
i made your photo my desktop since that’s the closest i’ll get to snow this week, despite being 19° farther north than you at the mo.
December 6th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
That’s a really cool shot. It has a nice Mars Rover feel to it.
December 8th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Is the Xserve running now? Are you able to monitor the iterations? Are you going to meet the deadline?