DEV Community: Aaron Williams

What I learned about the "best price" in retail and how it applies to AI

Aaron Williams — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 17:40:47 +0000

I remember early in my career working for the Retail group of a large company and I started learning about what was the "Best" price for a product. And the answer was always, "it depends, what is your goal? Sell more? Sell more of a different product (many products are linked together)? Help out your supplier?" And there are many, many other trade offs. IoT has the same issue with Real Time. Do you need the temperature once a minute? Once a second? What about speed? You can get the speed of a vehicle at 2000 times a second. But do you need it? Can the mobile network handle that much data? And do you want to pay for it?

I think of all of this when I see all of the hype in AI/ML that is currently happening. "We need supper fast GPUs to do AI" Do you need it for everything? They are a lot more expensive and use a lot more energy.

Tony Rigoni wrote a blog post about this and he gives you three things to think about when deploying AI:

Deploy only the amount of compute you need to meet the performance requirements of your application and use general purpose rather than specialized processors as broadly as possible to maintain flexibility for future compute needs.
Switch AI CPU-only inferencing from legacy x86 processors to Cloud Native Processors. With the performance, you may be able to deploy as CPU-only for a wider range of AI workloads than with legacy x86 processors.
Combine GPU with the power efficient processors for heavier AI training or LLM inferencing workloads.
Basically, use the more efficient processors where you can and save specialized processors for when you need them.

Check out his full post here.

And BTW while there might not be a "best price", there is a worse price. $1.06, followed by anything ending in .06 . You will sell a lot more at 99 cents and you won't sell less at $1.09.

Want to learn more about Aarch64/ARM64 servers? Check out our community!

Running Redis on Ampere Processors- getting better performance by moving from a legacy architecture

Aaron Williams — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 00:13:01 +0000

If you are already running Redis, you already know its power and speed has made it the most popular key-value database. This comes from it holding the entire dataset in memory, allowing low latency reads and writes. But this isn’t anything that you don’t know.

What you might not know is that you can get better performance and better performance/watt (i.e. better energy efficiency) by just switching your server architecture from a legacy x86 system to the modern cloud native AArch64 architecture like Ampere Computing's Altra and Altra Max processors.

Want to get started and learn how to fine tune your Redis? Check out our Redis documentation on our developer site.

Questions or want to learn more about the Ampere AArch64/ARM64 community, check out our forum.

Ampere Server Tuning Guides

Aaron Williams — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 17:41:40 +0000

So, you have moved to an AArch64/ARM64 server and want to get more performance out of your

Hadoop
MongoDB
MySQL
PostgreSQL
Redis instances (plus Java and many others)?

Well the Ampere Developer Center has you covered with our collection of Tuning Guides. We have them and tutorials for many of the top open source projects.

Maybe you are new ARM64 Servers but want to take advantage super efficient chips, with massive amounts of cores, but don't know where to start. Our solutions page is a great place to start.

Have questions or just want to meet other AArch64 enthusiasts?
Check out our ever growing community. Our friendly members are very willing to help you grow your knowledge and abilities in the ARM64 Server ecosystem.

FOSSY '23 CfP Open

Aaron Williams — Fri, 12 May 2023 23:12:24 +0000

The Ampere/AArch64 Server community is fortunate to have been accepted to host a track at the Software Freedom Conservancy’s inaugural FOSSY (Free and Open Source Software Yearly) conference in Portland, Oregon July 13-16. The CfP is currently open and we are looking for submissions for the AArch64/ARM64 community.

The theme for the track is the journey that a developer, architect, or dev ops person would go through from the discovery of AArch64/ARM64, learning why to use them, who is using them, and how to get started. Please see the our introduction document for more details for more details.

The CfP closes next Thursday, 18 May.