I did VOS and database performance stuff at Stratus from 1989-95. Stratus was the hardware fault tolerant company. Tandem, our arch rivals, did software fault tolerance. Our architecture was “pair and spare”. Each board had redundant everything and was paired with a second board. Every pin out was compared on every tick. Boards that could not reset called home. The switch from Motorola 68K to Intel was a nightmare for the hardware group because some instructions had unused pins that could float.
> Stratus was the hardware fault tolerant company. Tandem, our arch rivals, did software fault tolerance. Our architecture was “pair and spare”.
To expand on this, when Tandem switched MIPS from their proprietary processors, the CPUs were duplicated on a board and compared, and if they disagreed, the logical CPU would halt, similar to Stratus. The software-pair backup processes in a different logical CPU would then take over.
Donations to APOPO can be made at apopo.org. I was at the APOPO Visitors Center in Cambodia last year when the Trump administration eliminated all USAID funding for APOPO. The bombs being removed by APOPO in S.E. Asia were dropped by the U.S. during the Nixon and Johnson presidencies.
Emphatic second for the Affinity recommendation. The three products are extremely easy to use and have a consistent look and feel. I bought the books for Photo and Designer and never used them because 99% of the features are intuitive and every time I got stuck someone on the very active user forum set me straight. Also, the tutorials and how-to videos are excellent. You can buy a Windows laptop and all three Affinity products for less than one year’s subscription to Adobe.
Another FPGA sweet spot is analyzing TB/PB-scale databases. Netezza programmed FPGAs to uncompress, project, restrict (including NULLs), enforce isolation & visibility and check CRCs at disk scan rates (>200MB/sec). When touching a handful of columns from a 20-200 column table, CPUs spend most of their time stalled on cache line misses. FPGA-projecting just those few columns into memory enormously increases cache hit rates.
