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jangray.bsky.social
Jan Gray
@jangray.bsky.social
1.1K followers 1.3K following 880 posts
Kilocore RISC-V FPGA accelerators; former Microsoft dev tools architect; Vice-chair RISC-V SoftCPU SIG & Composable Custom Extensions Task Group; blog: https://fpga.org. Cyclist. Let's try kindness. 🇨🇦-🇺🇸
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jangray.bsky.social
Bitcam About box:
“HELIOGRAPHE
In Memory Of
Bill Atkinson“

Class.
Bitcam About box: HELIOGRAPHE In Memory Of Bill Atkinson
November 9, 2025 at 6:48 PM
jangray.bsky.social
Alas, your idea inbox seems to be rejecting ideas.
Undeliverable notice: "The group onegreatidea only accepts messages from people in its organization or on its allowed senders list, and your email address isn't on the list."
November 9, 2025 at 4:36 AM
jangray.bsky.social
For onegreatidea @thestar.com

IDEA: reimagine and reopen Ontario Science Centre in Flemingdon Park as the Future of Canada Centre

CC: @mark-carney.bsky.social @onsciencecentre.bsky.social @saveosc.bsky.social @canadianarchitect.bsky.social @normsworld.bsky.social @dontrailtalker.bsky.social
Text of an email submitted to onegreatidea@thestar.ca "IDEA: reimagine and reopen Ontario Science Centre in Flemingdon Park as the Future of Canada Centre: Even after 50 MILLION visitors it was hard to appreciate how much the Ontario Science Centre contributed to the lives, careers, enterprises, and civic commonwealth of Toronto, Ontario, and Canada. But Premier Ford abruptly fenced it off and denuded it of exhibits, for an (abandoned) concept of a plan atop Therme's submarine parking garage obligation. Since Ford has no use for Moriyama's masterpiece, it's time for a visionary partnership between the City of Toronto and the Federal Government to reimagine and reopen it as the "Future of Canada Centre". Its new mission: to curate a constantly-renewing experiential showcase of Canada's most innovative companies and universities, and to inform, delight, and inspire to STEM careers, schoolbuses-full of our kids. PM Carney's "Canada Strong" Budget calls for generational investments in the future of Canada. What better single manifestation of this, than an all-day, one-stop expo, where we can experience together the new worlds of AI, robotics, drones, new transportation, advanced manufacturing, new energy and resources, new medicine, biotech, and agriculture, new space industries, climate change, growing up online, our changing homes, cities, and lives? The 1970s OSC taught us math, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, geology, ecology, but also forestry, mining, refining, hydro power, automation. So too can a new Future of Canada Centre, (re)opening fall 2028, prepare Canadians for the onrushing future."
November 9, 2025 at 4:17 AM
jangray.bsky.social
No, he is not.

Please convey to the management that the recurrent trolling brings a bad smell to your periodical.
Economist cover, Sept. 25, 1993, Boris Yeltsin, fist raised, caption: All or nothing Economist cover, Oct. 9, 1993, Russian White House burns, caption: Yeltsin regrets
November 2, 2025 at 12:26 PM
jangray.bsky.social
Surely the oldest person at Rocky Horror tonight at The Princess. It’s been 45+ years since that first showing that I tagged along with the MathSoc crew.

Exciting, illicit, and transgressive then, now? Well, quite lovely to see it again with this new generation.

Thank you bygone friends and times.
Photo of a playing card, queen of diamonds, “cards for sorrow, cards for pain…”
October 31, 2025 at 3:43 AM
jangray.bsky.social
Habitat 👇
The Rainforest at Ontario Science Centre. Photo by Moriyama Teshima Architects. From https://thelocal.to/ontario-science-centre-closed/
October 27, 2025 at 8:23 PM
jangray.bsky.social
Me, on low precision floating point LUT golf.

“Then multiplication is just a table lookup of the resulting 6b fraction after normalization and rounding. With 3b fraction inputs a.f and b.f you require 2^(3+3) = 64 entries, perfect for a 6 6-LUT 64x6b ROM. …”

From fpga.org/2023/11/27/r...
From https://fpga.org/2023/11/27/risc-v-composable-extensions-for-microscaling-data-formats-for-ai-tensors/ : “It is inexpensive to multiply such low precision floats in 6-LUT FPGAs. For example assume (flush-to-zero) normalized E4M3 × E4M3 products have a target precision of E4M6. The product of two E4M3 1.f 4b significands lie in [1.0000002 , 11.1000012]. If the product >= 2.0, normalize it by shifting the binary point to the left, i.e., 1.11000012 x 2-1, and round/truncate the (underlined) least significant bit. Then multiplication is just a table lookup of the resulting 6b fraction after normalization and rounding. With 3b fraction inputs a.f and b.f you require 23+3 = 64 entries, perfect for a 6 6-LUT 64x6b ROM. Add one LUT for the (>=2.0) shift signal and 0.5 of a 5,5-LUT for the XOR of the sign bit. Add 0.5-2 LUTs for zeroes. The (twice biased) product exponent is (a.e + b.e + shift), 4 LUTs. In all, perhaps 14 LUTs and two LUT delays. Cheap. The greater cost of the dot product’s multiply-accumulate is the adder / adder tree. The sum of (e.g.) four element-wise products 1×2-6 + 1×2-4 + 1×2-2 + 1×20 = 1.0101012 x 20. Naively each add requires a pre-addition shifter to align mantissas, an add/sub, and then a CLZ circuit and another shifter to renormalize the sum/difference. How wide those shifters are, how wide the sum reduction adder precision is, ideally, depends on the adder tree requirements. But compared to the two LUT delays of of the multiplier, this FP reduction adds more LUT delays / pipeline stages as well as area. “It all adds up.
October 27, 2025 at 11:41 AM
jangray.bsky.social
Alison Smith and Thomas Colpeper, JP, sit in the tall grass, undiscovered, on the hill near the bend in the Pilgrim’s Road, from A Canterbury Tale (1944)
September 24, 2025 at 8:55 PM
jangray.bsky.social
Hello old friend.

(I continue to feel intense contempt for Premier Biff Tannen / Doug Ford, Minister for Prevarication Kinga Surma, and co., for maliciously and/or stupidly (hard to tell) ruining @onsciencecentre.bsky.social.)
The Ontario Science Centre black hole simulation (decaying orbit steel balls falling into the gravity well), visiting Waterloo today. Let us all share a moment of contempt and spite for Doug Ford, Kinga Surma, and Michael Lindsay / Infrastructure Ontario, and co., for wantonly starving, shuttering, denuding, and ruining Ontario Science Centre.
September 20, 2025 at 5:32 PM
jangray.bsky.social
A lovely visit to @perimeterinstitute.ca. Well done, thank you, and happy 25th anniversary PI.
September 20, 2025 at 4:21 PM
jangray.bsky.social
For example
Excerpt of the UW Tools expl diff (https://www.thinkage.ca/gcos/expl/diff.html) documentation for the diff command illustrating the use of +opt and -opt and setting= conventions.
September 10, 2025 at 4:24 PM
jangray.bsky.social
Congratulations @clairexen.bsky.social: #HotChips / IEEE TCMM 2025 Open Source Hardware Contribution Award
Slide from Hot Chips 2025: "2025 TCMM Open Source Hardware Contribution Award: Claire Wolf: In recognition of outstanding contributions to RISC-V — including BitManip, RVFI, and PicoRV32—and to open-source tools like Yosys and IceStorm. [IEEE Computer Society TCMM / Technical Community on Microprocessors and Microcomputers]"
August 27, 2025 at 1:33 AM
jangray.bsky.social
#HotChips Wow, fantastic talk by Idan Burstein on NVIDIA ConnectX-8 800G RDMA SmartNIC, esp. explaining the many essential roles of such a "SuperNIC" in NVIDIA's AI datacenter scale-up. Oh, BTW, it's also a PCIe gen6 switch and an 8x100G switch. A forbidding and formidable part of the "NVIDIA moat".
"ConnectX-8 Isn’t Just Another NIC – It’s a SuperNIC! RDMA technology deployed over millions of GPUs 800G RDMA hardware pipeline, designed for AI bandwidth, latency and scale Integrated load balancing, congestion control and reliability Deep data-path programmability for AI workload and data center versatility Tight integration to system architecture Enterprise-class security" "ConnectX-8 PCIe Switch – First Deployment of PCIe G6 800G SuperNIC GB300 platform ConnectX-8 PCIe Switch RDMA PSA Packet Processor Spectrum-X Ethernet Switch NIC Memory System DPA Event Processor Host / GPU Verbs NCCL NIXL DOCA (PCC / PRDMA / FLOW) Network Spectrum-X Quantum-X CX8 PCIe switch enables • First deployment of PCIe G6 and 800G AI networking • Saving of NVLINK C2C bandwidth for Blackwell Ultra • QoS between networking, GPU, CPU and SSD" Slide shows how the 8x100G switch functionality powers "64X GPU Scale" -- 128K GPUs instead of 2K GPUs Slide shows how "Spectrum-X Ethernet Congestion Control & Routing employs 'Mountains of hardware and software co-design between the SuperNIC and the Switch'"
August 26, 2025 at 2:17 AM
jangray.bsky.social
Fun includes 2 write/cycle regfile and interpipeline hazards.

WM-2 and SuperSPARC had cascading ALUs, latter combinationally.

websrv.cecs.uci.edu/~papers/mpr/...
Clip of a Microprocessor Report article on SuperSPARC with a figure showing an execute pipeline with an unconventional combinationally cascaded set of ALUs.
August 25, 2025 at 10:47 AM
jangray.bsky.social
Google's 2025 Ironwood TPU scales up HBM/SoC BW ~3X and scales up flops/SoC 10X (4614 TFLOPS FP8) vs. 2023 v5p (459 TFLOPS BF16).
Chart "TPU Systems at a glance" showing 2025 Ironwood TPU scales up HBM/SoC BW 3X (2.8 TBps => 7.4 TBps) and scales up flops/SoC 10X (4614 TFLOPS FP8) vs. 2023 v5p (459 TFLOPS BF16).
August 24, 2025 at 7:16 PM
jangray.bsky.social
Different tradeoffs for
NVIDIA B200 liquid cooled NVL72 -- one rack
vs.
Meta AALC air cooled / liquid cooled NVL72 -- six racks,
supporting their unique requirements, software stack, infrastructure, operations
Photo of front and back of Nvidia B200 w/ 72 GPUs, 120 KW One GB200 NVL tray with 2 Grace ARM multicore CPUs + DRAM + 4 Blackwell GPUs Photo of Meta's Catalina pod, air cooled + twice as many Grace SoCs, is 1/6 as dense as watercooled GB200. Four racks of cooling, two racks of computer + switches. Meta uses one Blackwell per Grace. Requires two racks intead of one (NV GB200) but doubles Graces + Grace DRAM (34 TB vs 17 TB).
August 24, 2025 at 6:55 PM
jangray.bsky.social
The goodwill that Canada and US shared, “entre amis”.
Photograph of four Canada stamps depicting two copies of the Apollo 11 CSM and LM, bracketed by earth and the moon, celebrating its 50th anniversary, 1969-2019.
August 8, 2025 at 4:16 PM
jangray.bsky.social
A past drama on a French train — many bikes boarded sans reservations and Mme. Conductor is not happy. Some bikes must detrain.
Photo of too too many bikes and riders clogging a French train.
August 7, 2025 at 1:24 PM
jangray.bsky.social
To this day his van(s) are still to be found in Rothenburg ob der Tauber!
Photo of yours truly hamming it up and channeling the Child Catcher, photographed in front of two Child Catcher vans in Rothenburg ob der Tauber.
August 6, 2025 at 8:07 PM
jangray.bsky.social
From a 02/2024 reply from @actblueorg.bsky.social on their spam problem.

“Donor contact information is vital for campaigns and organizations in order for them to engage with supporters like you through email and texting” => it is a feature, not a bug.
Quote from an email from actblue re: the deluge of spam I receive when donating through them. “Thanks for reaching out, and I'm sorry to hear you've been receiving so many unwanted donation requests. I completely understand how frustrating it must be. I truly wish I could take care of this for you, but ActBlue does not have control over these messages. When you donate, we send the information necessary for federal compliance along with your email address to the organization you donated to. We never solicit on behalf of the campaigns and organizations that use our platform, nor do we share your information with anyone beyond the groups you have donated to. We also never sell your information and only include your phone number if you choose to provide it. Donor contact information is vital for campaigns and organizations in order for them to engage with supporters like you through email and texting programs. However, I understand that these communications can become”
August 6, 2025 at 7:27 PM
jangray.bsky.social
Radix sort. Next!

(See also: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched...)
Bugs Bunny says “Next!” at the end of Rabbit of Seville.
July 27, 2025 at 4:33 AM
jangray.bsky.social
I also noted Rothenberg has a medieval crime and punishment museum (I always skip these).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFSB...

In short, although a coincidence, I had the eerie feeling that Gene Wolfe had been here decades before and had taken notes. //
Photo of Rothenberg's evocative The Night Watchman (tour).
July 23, 2025 at 2:43 AM
jangray.bsky.social
Some blunt tipped executioner's swords and inscriptions. Nothing Terminus Est.
Photo of some blunt tipped executioner's swords on display. Photo of a sword labeled with inscription translated from German: "The lords intervene [in] your disaster, I execute their last decision" and "If I lift this sword I wish to the sinner the eternal life". Photo of another sword from 1754 labeled with a similar inscription translated from German: "The Lords intervene in disaster; I execute their last decision" and "If I lift this sword; I wish to the sinner the eternal life". Woodcut from 1493, Beheading of a lansquenet, showing an executioner about to behead the kneeling victim with the longsword.
July 23, 2025 at 2:43 AM
jangray.bsky.social
@rereadingwolfe.bsky.social @alzabosoup.bsky.social:
In the Baumann weapons collection of the Rothenberg ob der Tauber city museum, are several executioner's swords.

First I read this display about the town guilds, feast days, guild parades, and the sociallly excluded executioner's guild...
A panel titled "Zunfte" (Guilds) reading variously "Personal life was also influenced by guild membership, for example through communal worship and special feast days. ... In addition to the respected professions, there were also the so-called "dishonest" professions such as executioner, knacker, or baliff, which was often associated with social exclusion. Below the text is a image labeled "Parade of the guilds at the district agricutural festival in Rothenberg; coloured lithograph by Ernst Bauer, 1850. Photo of a display cabinet of various guilds' relics and physical tokens.
July 23, 2025 at 2:43 AM
jangray.bsky.social
Another FU from Microsoft — opening a PDF attachment in iOS Outlook forces you to Open M365 Copilot
A screen cap from MS Outlook on iOS that shows that if you try to read a PDF attachment MS will obscure your document with a horrible “Open M365 Copilot” button because some MS program manager hates you.
July 21, 2025 at 7:59 PM