adamsgaard.dk

005-energy-efficient-programming.html (4119B)

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 <p>I presented my thougts on scientific software development during
 <a href="gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2020">brcon 2020</a>.  Full
 abstract:</p>
 
 <blockquote>Numerical models are used extensively for simulating
 complex physical systems including fluid flows, astronomical events,
 weather, and climate.  Many researchers struggle to bring their
 model developments from single-computer, interpreted languages to
 parallel high-performance computing (HPC) systems.  There are
 initiatives to make interpreted languages such as MATLAB, Python,
 and Julia feasible for HPC programming.  In this talk I argue that
 the computational overhead is far costlier than any potential
 development time saved.  Instead, doing model development in C and
 unix tools from the start minimizes porting headaches between
 platforms, reduces energy use on all systems, and ensures reproducibility
 of results.</blockquote>
 
 <p>You can check out the slides and audio here:</p>
 
 <ul>
 <li><a href="https://adamsgaard.dk/pub/energy-efficient-programming.md">slides (markdown)</a></li>
 <li><a href="https://adamsgaard.dk/pub/brcon2020-energy-efficient-programming-in-science-talk.ogg">audio (ogg)</a></li>
 </ul>
 
 <p>Alternatively, you can watch slides+audio in this video:</p>
 <center>
 	<video poster="video/brcon2020-energy-efficient-programming-in-science-talk.jpg"
 		controls preload="none" class="mediaframe">
 		<source src="video/brcon2020-energy-efficient-programming-in-science-talk.webm" type="video/webm">
 		<source src="video/brcon2020-energy-efficient-programming-in-science-talk.ogv" type="video/ogg">
 		<source src="video/brcon2020-energy-efficient-programming-in-science-talk.mp4" type="video/mp4">
 		<a href="video/brcon2020-energy-efficient-programming-in-science-talk.mp4">Link</a>
 	</video>
 </center>
 
 <p>
 The full conference
 schedule and presentation recordings are available <a
 href="gopher://bitreich.org/1/con/2020">here</a>.
 
 <p>Brcon is the annual meeting of <a
 href="gopher://bitreich.org">bitreich</a>, an initiative to promote
 minimal and perfect programming and system design practice.  In a
 nutshell, the philosophy favors simple and well-designed solutions
 (e.g. C, POSIX, Unix) over convoluted and hyped software-development
 tools (cloud deployment, docker, systemd, autotools, and so on).
 The bitreich information site uses the WWW-precursor protocol <a
 href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)">gopher</a>,
 demonstrating that information transfer can occur without the ugly
 mess of the modern web that is html, javascript, cookies, and
 trackers.  The conference was held virtually, but the minimal and
 open standards used for conference participation is a perfect example
 of the bitreich philosophy.</p>
 
 <p>The presentations were displayed by <a
 href="gopher://bitreich.org/1/scm/catpoint">catpoint(1)</a> which
 takes text files and shows the content as slides in the terminal.
 The audio stream was publically broadcast via <a
 href="https://icecast.org">icecast</a>.  Each presenter would stream
 their mic to the icecast server, for example via <a
 href="https://ffmpeg.org/">ffmpeg(1)</a>:</p>
 
 <pre><code>ffmpeg -loglevel debug -f sndio -ac 2 -ar 44100 -i snd/0 \
     -codec libmp3lame -f mp3 \
     icecast://source:${pass}@bitreich.org:3232/live
 </code></pre>
 
 <p>The listeners would point a network audio client to this URL and
 hear the speaker in real time.  For the slides, the viewers connected
 via ssh(1) to a public guest account, automatically attached to a
 multiplexed terminal session controlled by the presenter, and watched
 the presentation in their own terminal with minimal bandwith
 requirements.  Questions were communicated via irc.</p>
 
 <p>The source code for my presentation is available <a
 href="https://src.adamsgaard.dk/brcon2020_adc/log.html">here</a>.
 The <a href="gopher://bitreich.org/1/scm/pointtools">pointtools</a>
 utility md2point(1) is useful for generating catpoint presentations,
 as it reads presentations in markdown format, does some light
 styling, and outputs catpoint-compatible text files.</p>
 
 <p>It doesn't get more minimal, efficient, and perfect than that!</p>