------------------------------- Wed Mar 18 06:48:26 PM EDT 2026 ------------------------------- Transcript of Chat box from BLU meeting, Wed, Mar 18. 2026 Meeting held online via Jitsi Meet In attendance (17 total): Speaker(s): * Shanvar Viswanathan BLU officers: * John Abreau * Jerry Feldman Attendees (named): * Brandon Vogel * Charles Durst * Fredy * James Shaw * Jeff Gold * Kurt Keville * Michael I * Randy Cole * Robert Luoma * Tom Leja * Violet Pfeiffer Attendees (anonymous): * B * Chuba * VAB ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:give me a few minutes. I was watching something 18:28 ------------------------------------------------------------- John Abreau says:OK 18:29 John Abreau says: https://blu.org/meetings/2026/03/factforge_report_20260318_175209.html 18:38 ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says: https://nixos.org/ 18:49 ------------------------------------------------------------- Fredy Fredy says:👍 19:01 ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:Does anyone remember symbolics and thinking machines 19:03 ------------------------------------------------------------- Kurt Keville says:oh, yeah.... 19:03 Kurt Keville says:Not truly AI in the conventional sense 19:04 ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:Yes, but we are talking 40 years ago. 19:05 ------------------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:Slides are showing up fine if you click on Shankar's slides on the right-side, I think. 19:11 ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:another issue is that Shankar's voice sounds wierd almost if it is being sped up. 19:16 ------------------------------------------------------------- James (W1) Shaw says:I agree. that was weird. a screen popped up that seems to track everyones desktop cursor. that seems to be a function that only can come from Jitsi. 19:17 ------------------------------------------------------------- John Abreau says:that weird screen was the jitsi whiteboard, which overrode the desktop sharing function. 19:18 ------------------------------------------------------------- James (W1) Shaw says:makes sense. thanks for explaining. 19:19 does HBM DRAM require more cooling overall? 19:22 ------------------------------------------------------------- Violet Pfeiffer Does the speaker's voice sound distorted to anyone else? I'm not sure if it is just on my end. 19:22 ------------------------------------------------------------- John Abreau says:Yes, it seems everyone is hearing it. 👍 19:23 ------------------------------------------------------------- James (W1) Shaw says:👍 19:23 ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:Yes, I mentioned it earlier.It does not sound like Shankar 19:23 ------------------------------------------------------------- Tom Leja says:having the shared memory across is very nice. I think of this as L1/L2 Cache. Being able to access full memory, even at a substantially lower speed would open development opportunities. does this solution allow this? 19:23 ------------------------------------------------------------- VAB says:I think it was an echo. I muted one of the participants. 19:24 ------------------------------------------------------------- Violet Pfeiffer says:It sounds the same to me. 19:24 ------------------------------------------------------------- VAB says:Hopefully, it is better now. 19:24 ------------------------------------------------------------- James (W1) Shaw says:sounds like an audio filter is being used 👍 19:24 ------------------------------------------------------------- VAB says:It sounds ok. 19:24 ------------------------------------------------------------- Violet Pfeiffer says:No, like a minion. 19:24 ------------------------------------------------------------- Kurt Keville says:Helium 👍 19:24 ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:Are you an AI bot pretending to be shankar 19:25 ------------------------------------------------------------- Kurt Keville says:We can play this back at .75x speed 19:25 ------------------------------------------------------------- James (W1) Shaw says:or Shankar pretending to be an AI bot. Will we ever know? 19:26 ------------------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:Might be worth switching the presenter audio + video for a sec to see if the problem is Jitsi or Shankar's connection. 19:26 ------------------------------------------------------------- Chuba says:The speaker might want to call in instead to take care of the voice distortion. The dial-in number is: +1.512.647.1431 and the PIN: 1291 6379 58# 19:27 ------------------------------------------------------------- Violet Pfeiffer says:Welcome back, Shankar. 19:31 ------------------------------------------------------------- Shankar Viswanathan says:can you hear me? 19:32 ------------------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:We cannot 19:32 ------------------------------------------------------------- Violet Pfeiffer says:Shankar, can you dial in? 19:32 ------------------------------------------------------------- Shankar Viswanathan says:I can try 19:33 Shankar Viswanathan says:what's the number? 19:33 ------------------------------------------------------------- VAB says:The openstandard to replace NVLINK I was speaking of: https://ualinkconsortium.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------- Violet Pfeiffer says:Shankar: The dial-in number is: +1.512.647.1431 and the PIN: 1291 6379 58# 19:33 ------------------------------------------------------------- VAB says: The dial-in number is: +1.512.647.1431 and the PIN: 1291 6379 58# 19:34 ------------------------------------------------------------- Kurt Keville says: https://www.sifive.com/press/sifive-nvidia-nvlinkfusion-datacenter 19:34 ------------------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:Framework 13 is great but hinges still could use woek. 19:35 Brandon Vogel says:(work) 19:35 ------------------------------------------------------------- Randy C 2 says:Old school telco codec sound quality! 👍 19:37 ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:A guy at the Dull Mens group bought the 12 in and he is happy with it. 19:38 ------------------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:Remember the "You can hear a pin drop" AT&T commercials? 😂 19:38 ------------------------------------------------------------- Randy C 2 says:Brandon, you mean Sprint FON. It was really superior 👍 19:39 ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:That was before Southwest Bell bought AT&T 19:39 ------------------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:Randy you are totally right - I was misremembering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnlqrMWVYCs 19:40 Brandon Vogel says:Wow - that's a lot of power! 19:44 19:44 ------------------------------------------------------------- John Abreau says:I imagine you could heat a large office building with a rack like that. 19:45 ------------------------------------------------------------- James (W1) Shaw says:what is the die size? 19:45 James (W1) Shaw says:Seems interesting that it looks symmetric like a left and right side brain. 19:49 ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:My frameworks has a Ryzen 7 CPU 19:50 ------------------------------------------------------------- Violet Pfeiffer says:I don't have much faith in Nvidia on that front. 19:51 ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman Jerry Feldman says:Gaudi was a newscaster in New Orleans when I was in college 19:53 ------------------------------------------------------------- Tom Leja says:pydantic data validation helps that also 19:55 ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:Sorry it was Hap Glaudi 19:55 ------------------------------------------------------------- James (W1) Shaw says:a hive mentality 20:07 ------------------------------------------------------------- John Abreau says:The hive of Locutus. Resistance is futile! ❤️ 20:08 ------------------------------------------------------------- James (W1) Shaw says:more ants in volume than humans 20:11 ------------------------------------------------------------- Tom Leja says:i can see this being a dominant architecture in 10 to 20 years 20:12 👍 20:12 a math co processor on steroids 20:18 ------------------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:It's a funny sign of Intel's slide when that's the one missing on a discussion on processors. 20:22 ------------------------------------------------------------- John Abreau says: https://blu.org/meetings/2026/03/factforge_report_20260318_175209.html 20:28 ------------------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:Thank you, Shankar! This was a great session. 20:31 ------------------------------------------------------------- Chuba says:A lot of links on this slide. Will you be sharing the slides? 20:33 ------------------------------------------------------------- B says:Fantastic presentation, Shankar. Thank you for taking the time to put it together and share tonight. Very informative - Brian 20:35 ------------------------------------------------------------- John Abreau says:Shankar will be sending me his slides, and I'll post them on the BLU website. 20:35 ------------------------------------------------------------- Chuba says:And Kurt's slides? 20:35 ------------------------------------------------------------- VAB says:I do have a copy. And, there is also one on the shelves at MIT Libraries (which is a memory of Inter Library Loan - so you can borrow it through Boston Library (and other local are libraries)) 20:36 VAB says:err member 20:37 ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:The original Alpha did not have a floating point processor. 20:39 Jerry Feldman says:They added it in EV5 20:39 ------------------------------------------------------------- Tom Leja says:lol 20:40 ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:The problem with floating point is it is all power of 2. 20:40 ------------------------------------------------------------- Shankar Viswanathan says:There is also a lot of issues with rounding and how rounding errors propagate 20:42 Shankar Viswanathan says:if you have y = m*x + b, there can be rounding after (m*x) and another rounding after that product is added with b. If you have an FMAC (multiply accumulate) block in hardware, rounding behavior can be different from separate fmul and fadd instructions 20:45 ------------------------------------------------------------- Jerry Feldman says:I had to fix a bug in denormals 20:48 Jerry Feldman says:And at the time I had no idea what a denormal was. 20:54 ------------------------------------------------------------- VAB says: github.com/stillwater-sc/universal 20:54 ------------------------------------------------------------- John Abreau says: https://blu.org/meetings/2026/03/factforge_report_20260318_175209.html 20:55 ------------------------------------------------------------- Brandon Vogel says:Is it these guys? https://www.etched.com/ 20:57 ------------------------------------------------------------- Kurt Keville says: https://posithub.org/ 21:02 ------------------------------------------------------------- Randy C linux says:fiber shortage due to fiber connected drones in ukraine war 😮 21:05 Randy C linux says:...china selling to both sides, boosted price above the cost of Starlink terminal 21:06 ------------------------------------------------------------- B says:Samsung SSD 9100 PRO 2TB, PCIe 5.0x4 M.2 2280, Seq. Read Speeds Up to 14,700MB/s, Best for AI Computing, Gaming, and Heavy Duty Workstations (MZ VAP2T0B/AM) bought on 12/1/25 has more than doubled in price 21:10 ------------------------------------------------------------- meeting ended at 21:10 pm