HoneyComb LX2K update 1 – after 2 months

It has been 2 month since my last post about my ARM workstation/server. I think it's time for an update for how thing are going and if there's problems. In sort: no. There's not major issus with the board. NXP and SolidRun have done a very good job building it. Performance Without a doubt, the...

Rocking a 16 core ARM workstation for data analysis and NAS – HoneyComb LX2K

I preordered the HoneyComb LX2K workstation board last October and I has finally arrived and I finally got time to build my ARM workstation. The process is challenging and fun! Building of the machine The LX2K is a very capable 16-core ARM workstation board selling at 750$ (550$ when I ordered, early access price). Providing...

CERN ROOT tips and tricks

This is more of a note for myself. Over time, I've learned some useful fact about ROOT that I now wish I have known when I started using ROOT. Hopefully as a ROOT user, you could also find  some of these helpful. Tell ROOT to not show the startup banner You do: user@somepc:~$ root -l...

Hacking code generated from ONNC Cortex-M backend to run on Cortex-A

Brute force software porting time again. This time I'm tasked to port some C generated from ONNC's Cortex-M backend to run on a Cortex A class processor. Sounds like a bad idea? It totally is! But I need that for research purposes - to add support for our academic AI accelerator - and writing and...

SAS vs ROOT. Roasting SAS and comparing to ROOT

Recently, guys from the department of Finance asked on the school's discussion group for someone to help them in a data analysis contest (Hosted by SAS). What can go wrong? I have heard good things about SAS since I'm 10. My mother's company uses SAS extensively. In the worst case we can write ML algorithms...

Why you should build your WebApp on C++

There's a lot of NDA involved, so expect me to gloss through details. My recent work involves writing a custom search engine for a client. It have to search through millions of records in a very short time according to a custom heuristic. Then sort and send the results back to the client. By boss...

Exploratory Data Analysis on a large dataset using ROOT.

Having been messing with the physicists' toy for a while. And not being a Python fan for Python's easiness to write dirty code. I find ROOT to be a fascinating tool. Allowing almost perfect scaling and can be written in a way to use basically no memory. I'll be putting ROOT to do real work,...

Real time plotting in C++ using ROOT

Sometime you just need to plot stuff as time progresses. Maybe you need to plot some statistics of your software, or visualize in realtime. But there's not much option. matplotlib is too slow for realtime, plplot's C/C++ interface is not maintained, QCustomPlot requires you to have a working Qt window and has a horrible API,...

How fast is cling/ROOT? Comparing C++ JIT to real compilers on a ray tracer.

I have been in loved with ROOT - CERN's Data Analysis framework and it's interactive C++ shell. But how fast is the code JITed by ROOT? I have find myself compiling ROOT scripts (aka. ACLiC, basically clang) more then I run them in the interpreter. So, let's find that out today. Further more, how fast...