Sunday, October 25, 2015

GPU vs CPU (@ Azure Cloud)

Microsoft has recently announced new Azure VM options that support high-end GPUs.
The reason: for some applications this is much more effective technical solution (see charts below)

Applications that scale using GPU Compute @ Microsoft Azure

Even Amazon Web Services is also offering similar options:
Windows GPU Instances - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud


Programming Guide :: CUDA Toolkit Documentation @ Nvidia
Floating-Point Operations per Second for the CPU and GPU.


The GPU Devotes More Transistors to Data Processing.

Colemak keyboard

QWERTY keyboard layout that was optimized for mechanical typing machines, not humans.
Dvorak Keyboard is created as more efficient alternative to Qwerty, 
but it is considered hard to learn because it changes all the keys on the keyboard. 

Colemak keyboard has only 17 keys moved from Qwerty layout, so it is faster to learn,  
and people are reporting more than doubling speed of typing with less effort... 

Since Microsoft's mission now is to: 
“empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” 
and they are already making good keyboards, it would be interesting if some of them start supporting more efficient keyboard layout like this, i.e. with help of machine learning to find more optimal keyboard layouts and apps to help you learn them.

"The QWERTY layout was designed in the 19th century. Colemak is a modern alternative to the QWERTY and Dvorak layouts. It is designed for efficient and ergonomic touch typing in English.
...
Ergonomic and comfortable – Your fingers on QWERTY move 2.2x more than on Colemak. QWERTY has 16x more same hand row jumping than Colemak. There are 35x more words you can type using only the home row on Colemak."



Azure Storage Documentation & Samples

Storage Documentation | Azure
"Learn about Azure Storage, and how to create applications using Azure blobs, tables, queues, and files"

Get started with Azure Storage in five minutes | Microsoft Azure

Azure QuickStarts

How to create, manage, or delete a storage account | Microsoft Azure