úterý 17. listopadu 2020

Project Cookbook: One tough product decision appetizer

Recipe from tsykora's Project Cookbook.

This appetizer is a brilliant choice for basically any multi course menu you are going to prepare. It combines all the beautiful flavours into one delicious delivery. Doesn't matter who exactly is preparing this one but you will need:

1x Product Manager

2x Managers/Leads from any team - depends on the taste of consumers

1x Well prepared document with risks and benefits

1x 15 minutes long meeting

1x Summary email with results


This one is all about preparation and quality of your ingredients. I definitely do not recommend to stew 1x Project Manager on 1x 15 minutes long meeting without 1x Well prepared document with risks and benefits shared in ADVANCE. In some cases if you need to be quick in the kitchen you can also use 1x Well prepared email instead of document but the result might be slightly different.

So, start with putting together 2x Managers/Leads from any team who are dealing with a special problem. Most of the times there is a clash of priorities and decision has to be made. Such decision is tough and usually not possible to be done without 1x Product Manager. If possible and if you are lucky you will have 1x PM and 2x Managers that work together very well. Put them out of the fridge gently and let 2x Managers talk.

Meanwhile prepare 1x Doc with risks and benefits. You need the decision about appetizer but you are not able to do it alone. Doc needs to be washed, dried, cleaned and cut on small pieces. Talk about benefits and risks openly and do your homework. Once you are finished, put this Doc together with 1x PM into a bowl and let it rest for 1 to 2 days if you are not in a big hurry.

Once rested, the PM should already absorbed the flavour from the Doc and this mix is prepared for 15 minutes long meeting. Better check before the meeting whether PM really absorbed all the flavour from Doc because if not you will have to boil everything for 30 minutes or even an hour.

Now - put everything into one big pot - PM, 2x Managers, Doc and 15 minutes meeting. You will have to boil it slowly and stir with wooden spoon. If it's too hot, immediately lower the heat level by using a small joke or telling that everybody is on the same page and pulling in one direction. If that does not help you will need to put the pot out of the cooker for a moment and let it cool down. If the decision has been made you are 90 % done at this moment and you can congratulate yourself. 

Bring in a promise that you will serve 1x Summary email with results with the rest of the family and start serving. The family can be small, medium or even very large. If you serve the very large family, keep things simple though and make sure you spend extra time during preparation of 1x Summary email with results.

And that's it - here you go. This appetizer is recommended for all dishes and in some cases you will need it either way. Sometimes the cooking time might be a bit longer, depends on the ingredients and how much strong taste you want for the appetizer. Also, if you are preparing this for a wider family you will need more ingredients. Use 4x or 6x Managers if needed and have ready even STRONGER 1x Well prepared document with risks and benefits. Then it should all work out well. 

Bon Appetit and let me know how your cooking went!

T.






Introducing Project Cookbook series

Hello everybody,

I have a feeling that sometimes I am running in circles and face the same issues repeatedly. What pisses me off is the fact that it takes a lot of time and thinking how to tackle a certain situation over and over again as well. That drives me absolutely crazy -- when we all were in a certain problem-solving event 1 year ago, this time it should take 50 % less time to solve it based on the previous experience, right? Right, but that's not happening. Without blaming anyone I found myself running in circles and trying to invent the solution that has been kind off FORGOTEN over time; probably due to workload or too wide focus on various issues flying around at the same moment.

I will write a small Project Cookbook -- mainly for my personal purposes and hopefully with a decent smile on my lips while doing so.

As for usual meal recipes you will ideally need quality ingredients and not forget anything from the full list otherwise the result might not be as tasty as you would expect :)

My recipes: 

One tough product decision appetizer

Overwhelmed soup by too many ingredients (preparing)

Main course from release blockers backlog (preparing)

Baked project triangle served with one vertex fixed (preparing)

Well done QE steak with customer satisfaction dipping sauce (preparing)

neděle 7. června 2020

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X and RTX 2070s for serious science while gaming

Hi there!
At the end of March 2020 I've joined BOINC project (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, https://boinc.berkeley.edu/). The primary reason was my personal interest and also the internal feeling of helping scientists fight COVID-19 using my PC.

I'm currently providing computational power for two projects: CPU for http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ and GPU for http://www.gpugrid.net/. As for June 2020 both projects are running and computing tasks that are tightly connected to addressing COVID-19.

I've spent a few days by fine-tuning my setup in order to provide my PC power to scientists BUT at the same moment not to interrupt my normal working/gaming flow.

I don't own anything crazy nor any "NASA PC" but still have a decent new rig: 8-core, 16 threads AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 3,6 GHz (4,4 turbo), 16 GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM and, most importantly, of course, ladies and gentlemen, beautiful NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER 8 GB!! which is - quite accidentally to be honest - the THIRD best GPU for connecting into the computational grids.

Source: https://www.primegrid.com/gpu_list.php, 7th June 2020: top rankings of fastest GPU models, cross-platform comparison:
  1. (1.000) TITAN V
  2. (0.711) GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
  3. (0.603) GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER
... and since TITAN V costs almost as an older small car in the Czech Republic and 2080 Ti is still more than double the price of my 2070s I am sure I made the BEST possible choice here.

Anyway, enough of showing off and let's get to the point of this blog post. Am I able to play some games and crunch tasks for Rosetta project at the same time? YES. Absolutely!

I was a little bit worried about COD Modern Warfare and using 50 % of Ryzen 7 3700X for Rosetta project at the very same moment(s) but it works like a charm. In practice, I am seriously using 8 threads for BOINC calculations while gaming on ultra settings here and FPS stays always above 90 and in average sits around 110 FPS value. Crazy. It is obvious that RTX 2070s does the heavy lifting here but... still... I did not know whether I will have to suspend Rosetta tasks every time I am about to play the most recent games or not. The power and throughput of CPU does not stop to impress me.

Temperature of CPU sits around comfortable 60-65 Celsius degrees. In order to avoid a lot of noise caused by CPU fan maxed out and my PC trying to fly away from my desk I switched off Gaming Turbo Boost option in BIOS and also disabled Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO). After this, CPU sits on core 3,6 GHz and fan RPM stays more or less constant AND quite silent. Which is very important factor for me as I have my PC on the table and right next to me. Before switching of those two settings, CPU was overriding it's core clock frequency from 3,6 GHz to anything between 3,6 and 4,4 according to the needs and immediately increased fan RPM and noise level significantly.

When I don't need my GPU anymore I enable GPUgrid project tasks in BOINC client and let the 2070s do the work. Maaaan, 9 TFLOPs of power in this graphic card speaks it's own language and I just gather the credits and badges on GPUgrid :D Some potential vaccines and protein structures are being calculated on my PC right now. Hopefully we will find something useful with other 4.5 million contributors around the world.


(7th June 2020) 
399th place in GPUgrid (Czech Team)
2415th place in Rosetta (Czech Team) 
World rank: 358,599th out of 4,417,167 (91.8817 percentile) 

Only 8,2 % of contributors around the world provided more resources than me so far - and I've just started :) I will try to update the progress here periodically.

If you are interested about helping scientists fighting (not only) COVID-19, check out: http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/ and https://www.gpugrid.net/. "You don't have to be scientist to do science." :)