Slashdot Mirror
AMD Forces a LibreOffice Speed Boost With GPU Acceleration
New submitter samtuke writes: AMD processors get rated and reviewed based on performance. It is in our self-interest to make things work really, really fast on AMD hardware. AMD engineers contribute to LibreOffice, for good reason. Think about what happens behind a spreadsheet calculation. There can be a huge amount of math. Writing software to take advantage of a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for general purpose computing is non-trivial. We know how to do it. AMD engineers wrote OpenCL kernels, and contributed them to the open source code base. Turning on the OpenCL option to enable GPU Compute resulted in a 500X+ speedup, about ¼ second vs. 2minutes, 21 seconds. Those measurements specifically come from the ground-water use sample from this set of Libre Office spreadsheets.
I wonder if a spreadsheet is really the right tool for computations that take several dozens of seconds on modern hardware, even without GPU acceleration. I am inclined to think it is not.
As someone who has never found a use for spreadsheets anyway, I wonder whether there is anyone who uses LibreOffice spreadsheets? For what is this used, accounting?
Just wondering...
Spreadsheets are tremendously useful for a number of things. Accounting is a perfect & common use. Doing cost estimates or comparisons, doing sensitivity analysis (what happens to the answer if I change one parameter?), anything where you have a table of data and you want to analyze it, sum it, average it, etc.
I like to play with orbital mechanics - "hard science fiction" scenarios such as orbital catapults and the like, and spreadsheets are a decent way to quickly run the numbers for a large range of parameters. For example, a few hundred mile tumbling-cable space elevator around the moon could grab payloads directly off the surface and launch them on Hoffman transfer orbits to Mars or Venus, without ever exceeding a fraction of a g acceleration.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You can use them for about anything where you need to keep track of some data and a database is overkill. Back in the day, I had a teacher using spreadsheet software for a grade book that could automatically sum the scores and apply a curve instead of having to do it all by hand. My brother would keep track of online auction data in a spreadsheet. I've seen a few people use them to make a quick and easy chore list for their kids. They're also useful for kids who want to make some simple graphs or charts for a school report. There are probably dozens of other ways that people use them on a regular basis that I might never imagine myself.
This is good of course, however, whenever I see a spreadsheet program used for any serious computation, I cringe. There are far better tools out there if you require real number crunching. Think Python + Panda for instance, or R, or Matlab if you are really into commercial programs, otherwise a nice interactive web page will usually do the trick. For accounting use a real accounting program, there are plenty out there. Spreadsheet programs are the lowest common denominator that allow the sharing of table-like information, but almost universally they are the wrong tool for the job. Just in the last week, I have seen spreadsheets used for a program logic workflow, a timetable, a university course schedule, to compute an FFT, to exchange student marks, to discuss a budget (with lots of deletions and remarks), and even for a presentation. In each and every case a more suitable, open-source, freely available, multi-platform application exists.
Of course this is software that people know, so usually we have to deal with it. As a rule I accept to work with other people's spreadsheets, but I usually refuse to create one ex-nihilo, unless there is a compelling reason to. For instance I teach a course on optimisation, and I do show how the solver in Excel / {Libre,Open}Office works. I have also on occasion shown people how to use a pivot table (never use those if you can help it).
The most severe problem I see with spreadsheet is that they have their use but they are fragile. It is too easy to load an extensive table into them and inadvertently modify just one cell, potentially undoing a lot of work. This is easy to detect if your spreadsheet is small, but if it span multiple tabs and an ungodly number of rows, you will not detect your error. Of course the format of these spreadsheet is obscure, and version control is typically not supported.
Personally the worst I have seen was one spreadsheet used for the accounting of 90+ separate research projects, spanning 30,000 cells. The accountant in charge of it was the person most attentive to detail I have ever seen. She was careful and the only person using it, which made her indispensable. We put in place a year-long plan for her retirement, involving scrapping her spreadsheet, entirely replacing it with a direct interface with SAP via a php-based web page. It was many months in the making, of course this was not a trivial project but we've pulled it off. In the process we discovered a huge number of accounting errors thanks to it, typically invoices that were never billed, to the tunes of nearly one million dollars. It took us several months to correct them.
The morals of this is never, ever use spreadsheets program for non-trivial work.
"A GPU is not 500 times faster than a CPU, more like 2 or 3 times"
Just on FLOPs alone you're dead wrong. The latest and greatest E-series Xeons (V3) have barely enough power to match the 9800GTX+ - about 800 GigaFLOPs. The 980 GTX Ti is roughly 5.6 TeraFLOPs.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
here are my answers. Spreadsheets are used in several cases:
1) When you have a small-to-medium-sized dataset (100m data points) and want to do a particular set of calculations or draw a particular set of conclusions from it just once or twice—so that the time invested in writing code in R or something similar is less than the time needed just to bung a few formulas into a spreadsheet and get your results. Once you get into analyses or processes that will be repeated many times, it makes more sense to write code.
2) Similar case, when you need to work with essentially tabular database data, but the operations you're performing (basic filtering, extracting records based on one or two criteria, just handing data from one person to the next) are either so simple or will be repeated so rarely that a MySQL database is overkill and just emailing a file back and forth is easier.
3) When you are working with data as a part of a team, and certain members of the team that are specialists in some areas related to the data, or (for example) members of the team that are doing your data collections, aren't particularly computationally expert. Spreadsheets are hard for laymen, but it's doable—a dozen or two hours of training and people can get a general, flexible grasp of spreadsheets and formulae. It takes a lot longer for someone to become basically proficient with R, MATLAB, MySQL, Python, etc., and you really want those specialists to just be able to do what they do to or with the data, rather than focusing their time and effort on learning computational tools. Spreadsheets are general purpose and have a relatively shallow learning curve relative to lots of other technologies, but they enable fairly sophisticated computation to take place—if inefficiently at times. They're like a lowest-common-denominator of data science.
We use Spreadsheets all the time in what we do, mostly as a transient form. The "heavy hitting" and "production" data takes place largely in MySQL and R, but there are constant temporary/intermediate moments in which data is dumped out as a CSV, touches a bunch of hands that are really not MySQL or R capable, and then is returned in updated form to where in normally lives.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Depends on what you mean by "faster." If you mean clock frequency, then perhaps. Also perhaps if you mean an individual core of a CPU vs a core of a GPU.
In this sense, it's the time to perform massively parallel instructions. GPUs are generally hundreds of times faster than CPUs for such calculations. Part of this is because a CPU can have a few cores, but a GPU generally has thousands of floating point units. The other part is that CPUs are general purpose central processors while GPUs are very specialized to optimize them for specific kinds of tasks.
Think of it like a CPU is 4 guys with Swiss Army Knives while a GPU is a team of 1,600 guys each with a battery powered, professional screwdriver. Guess which one's faster at screwing 1,600 wood screws into 400 posts for a building. Now guess which is faster at cutting a traced outline on a single piece of paper.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/w...
My opinion of Apple and Apple products has changed. Not that I'd ever buy an Apple product, but I went with a non-technical friend to an Apple store; she wanted me to go along when she bought a new Macbook. I was amazed at the high level of service and the extent of the support structure. She paid twice as much total for her Macbook as I paid for my Asus Zenbook (she bought the training and extended support which added $400 to the total), but she has a level of comfort that is rather high for a non-technical user.
I was pretty impressed, and I can see why people might want to buy the Apple brand. They don't care about the closed design and complete control by Apple. They want to have a place to go to get help and support, of a type and level that they can understand and feel good about. This particular Apple store was packed with people and always is. There's a reason, and I learned what it is that day.
That's funny because spreadsheets actually came from accounting. The first spreadsheet wasn't created by a geek or a programmer, it was created by an accountant. It's simply the electronic form of something that was already being done on paper.
Spreadsheets not suitable for finance or accounting?
That's where they came from.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"Or fewer"
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
I may be completely wrong but no features have been added in ages, no code updates etc. etc.
Does anyone know what's going on?
Also, would Base benefit from this GPU enhancement?
*** Don't be dull.***
While the intended workflow for data crunching on the desktop is typically served by R/Python/Julia among others, there are times you have to do some processing for a huge amount of data for a spreadsheet you have open in front of you. This is where AMD/LibreOffice will shine and this is a good motive to buy AMD and LibreOffice.
I just ran the test on both MS Office and LibreOffice. MS Office was 5.6x faster than LibreOffice with OpenCL turned off. MSOffice score 9705.51206654159, LibreOffice score 54296.0680468936. LibreOffice scored 218.087068492849 with OpenCL turned on. Hardware Core i3 2100, 8GB RAM, nVidia GTX 770 .
You make a good and valid point, but the people who are buying Apple for comfort will buy a new one every few years because that maintains their comfort level.
I learned, with my visit to the Apple store, that buying Apple for most people is not about
1) Being able to tweak and customize (in general; yes, you can do that if you know how)
2) Worrying about cost[1]
It is much more about
1) Comfort and assurance
2) Style
3) Relative ease of use, and lots of hand-holding.
As technical people we tend to forget how hard things can be for non-technical people. (And no, this is not because we're in any way "better" than they are, we just are good at different things.)
[1] It's true that many Apple buyers have plenty of cash. But I'm active in the local writers' community and it's amazing how many really poor writers (poverty is chronic for most writers) will scrape together every last cent to buy a Macbook.