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Kohler Co. was fined $20 million in part for skewing emissions tests with a 'defeat device.' What's that?

AnnMarie Hilton   | Sheboygan Press

Correction: Kohler only had defeat devices in electronic fuel injection engines, according to a federal complaint. This story previously misstated a type of engine that contained defeat devices.

SHEBOYGAN - In a recent settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency and the state of California, Kohler was docked $20 million in part for using defeat devices.

So, what's a defeat device?

The EPA has emissions limits that engines are required to meet in order to be sold. It usually tests those engines in a lab, according to Rachel Muncrief, deputy director of the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit that provides research, analysis and data for environmental policymakers.

"When those same engines are being used in the real world, a defeat device would essentially sense that the engine wasn't in the lab, wasn't undergoing a certification test and, in some cases, increase the emissions," Muncrief said.

Undisclosed and unapproved changes to an engine's emission controls are illegal. However, there are instances when emission controls would be approved. Those approved devices are known as alternative emissions controls devices, or AECDs.

More: Kohler agrees to pay $20 million in federal settlement over small engines violations

Nigel Clark, emeritus professor of engineering at West Virginia University, said manufacturers may want to use those controls to alter emissions levels to improve the engine's durability and fuel economy.

But manufacturers can't just decide unilaterally to put one into an engine, Muncrief said; they have to get approval from the EPA. She said there are strict guidelines for approval, and without it, altering emissions controls is illegal.

Modern defeat devices, Clark said, are usually found in fuel injection engines and electronic in nature, meaning they are programmed into the software of an engine.

The software controls the air-to-fuel ratio within the engine, and that affects how it burns fuel. If the software tells the engine to run "lean," there is excess air and the result is more nitrogen oxides — a major source of smog and pollution. If an engine runs "rich," it gets more fuel and produces carbon monoxide.

According to its website, Kohler's small engines are used in riding and push lawnmowers, pressure washers and generators. Small engines often contain carburetors, which are less likely to include defeat devices, Clark said. According to the complaint, Kohler had the devices in both carbureted and electronic fuel injection engines.

Vehicle engine emissions have been tightly regulated by the EPA, but non-road engines have had a more recent foray into emissions control.

Most defeat device settlements in recent years have involved car companies, like Volkswagen in 2016 and Fiat Chrysler in 2019.

Volkswagen was the subject of three partial settlements over 590,000 diesel vehicles, model years 2009 to 2016, equipped with defeat devices that drastically lowered emissions during tests, using computer software.

When the EPA learned of the difference in emission levels, Volkswagen didn't come clean right away, Muncrief said, which led to them paying a $1.45 billion fine, on top of recalls and other financial penalties.

Fiat Chrysler's civil penalty for 100,000 noncompliant vehicles totaled $305 million.

"I think other manufacturers see that and think, 'Oh, I don't want to be in that boat,' Muncrief said. "It's better to just admit it and try to work with the EPA and say, 'How can we fix this.'"

Had Kohler purposely been cheating?

Clark said it's possible for an experimental line of code that alters emissions to be accidentally left in the software of a fuel injection engine.

The EPA sent a notice of violation to Volkswagen for its use of defeat devices in September 2015.

Kohler Co. self-reported to EPA and the California Air Resources Board in December 2015 that it had been using the wrong test cycle to test many of its small engines.

According to information on the EPA's website, further investigation then revealed that millions of additional small engines were noncompliant — and that some were equipped with a defeat device.

Muncrief said her organization works with environmental agencies around the world, and in terms of enforcement, the EPA is one of the best. It has built a reputation of working with companies who are honest about mistakes and problems, and being harsher on those who try to lie or cover up violations.

"So that's why a lot of manufacturers in the U.S., when they notice they have a problem, they would voluntarily tell EPA and work together to fix it," she said.

The EPA announced a national compliance initiative for 2020 to 2023 to stop the manufacturing of defeat devices for car and non-road engines.

More: Patagonia and Sierra Club back legal fight against new Kohler golf course

More: 'This is always going to be part of me': Sheboygan County man's Indiana Jones collection required a custom house

Reach AnnMarie Hilton at or (920) 242-3032. Follow her on Twitter at @hilton_annmarie.

Our subscribers make this coverage possible. Click to see The Sheboygan Press's special offers at and download our app on the App Store or Google Play.


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text: BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VEVENT UID:WILD_APRICOT_EVENT_594297_SESSION_1 DTSTART:20130912T233000Z DTEND:20130913T013000Z SUMMARY:Contextual Task Analysis for an Enterprise Mobile App LOCATION:Trane\, 4833 White Bear Parkway\, St. Paul\, MN 55110 (Free Parking) DESCRIPTION:\n\nJoin us September 12th at Trane to hear Rachel Nilsson\, Usability Analyst\, discuss how her team used a contextual task analysis to set the scope and design of a mobile app for a building automation system.\n Rachel’s team recently created a mobile app for a complex and full-featured HVAC system controller\, which had previously only interfaced to a web application. When her team started planning the mobile app\, there were wildly divergent ideas among the team and stakeholders about which features and data from the web application should make the jump to the mobile app. To answer that question\, Rachel’s team conducted a contextual task analysis and used the data to set the scope and design of the app. The app release was successful\, both in terms of the number of downloads and the response from customers.\n Rachel’s presentation will walk us through how the contextual task analysis was planned and conducted and how the results were shared with the whole team and integrated into the design/development process for the app\, including the successes and pitfalls encountered.\n Agenda - Meet and greet with refreshments: 6:30 - 7:00 PM - Presentation with Q&A: 7:00 - 8:30 PM / Location Trane 4833 White Bear Parkway St. Paul\, MN 55110 (Free Parking) / About the Speaker Rachel Nilsson is a usability analyst for Trane. She has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of California\, Santa Barbara. She has spent that last 10 years designing user interfaces and conducting UX research. She specializes in enterprise web applications and mobile apps. Prior to joining Trane\, Rachel worked at Unisys. / About Trane At Trane\, we're all about air – cool air\, warm air\, clean air. As a world leader in air conditioning systems\, services and solutions\, we control the comfort of the air for people in homes and many of the world's largest and most famous commercial\, industrial and institutional buildings. And we're applying Trane's expertise in environmental technology and energy conservation to make a difference in energy efficiency around the globe. We offer a broad range of energy-efficient heating\, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems\; dehumidifying and air cleaning products\; service and parts support\; advanced building controls and financing solutions. Our systems and services have leading positions in premium commercial\, residential\, institutional and industrial markets\; a reputation for reliability\, high quality and product innovation\; and a powerful distribution network. DTSTAMP:20200807T120730Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR


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Why LeBron James A&R-ing 2 Chainz’s Latest Album Makes Perfect Sense

"Rap or Go to the League," the rapper's fifth studio release, is being hailed by critics.

2 Chainz performs at Sir Lucian
Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP/REX/S

Did 2 Chainz just drop the best album of his entire career? The critics have been hailing “Rap or Go to the League” — Pitchfork said the album “feels like a personal triumph” and Complex called it the rapper’s “best.” The rapper’s fifth studio effort is a project in which 2 Chainz, whose real name is Tauheed Epps, successfully and beautifully bridges the gap between sports and hip-hop. And it’s no wonder: basketball star LeBron James served as the album’s A&R (artists and repertoire — a guiding role through the recording process).

The title, “Rap or Go to the League” is meant to highlight the misconception that young black men see success in life as either athletes or rappers. The 14 songs exhibit the drive, hunger, fearlessness, courage and relentlessness needed to accomplish one’s dreams.

Indeed, the Atlanta native isn’t just a rapper, 2 Chainz is also an entrepreneur, father, husband, host of Viceland’s “Most Expensivest,” label-owner and all-around entertainer.

So where does this generation’s greatest NBA player come in? Variety lays down the LeBron connection below.

1. LeBron is the ultimate cosign.

LeBron’s taste in music is impeccable. If your record is caught playing in the background of one of his Snapchats or IG stories, chances are, you’ve made it. His signature head-bobs and stank face have become phenomena on their own — not to mention free promotion. Just ask Eminem, Rick Ross, Tee Grizzley or A$AP Rocky. The track “NCAA” is a reminder that 2 Chainz threw his hoop dreams out the window to pursue rap, while music serves as LeBron’s second biggest passion.

2. There’s no better hype-man.

LeBron James dancing in the mirror to “Girl’s Best Friend” featuring Ty Dolla $ign — 45 seconds of pure bliss — proves there’s no better hype-man for a 2 Chainz banger. There’s a high chance they’re bumping this at Lakers practice too.

3. Shared roots.

Both share a similar upbringing in being black males from the inner-city. LeBron hails from the rougher parts of Akron, Ohio, experiencing poverty as in his childhood and facing the reality of a nonexistent father who fell victim to the streets. “Threat 2 Society” has Tity Boi recalling the former days of trapping and hoop dreams, the latter of which LeBron has conquered. To wit: the line, “I’m so famous, can’t even cough in peace.”

4. Raising the bar of black excellence.

With 47.7 million followers on Instagram and 42.3 million on Twitter, as of this writing, LeBron is making the most of his platform, touching on everything from music to sports to politics and television. In fact, 2 Chainz chose LeBron to work with him because of the Athlete’s place in the culture. “Momma Hit A Lick,” featuring Kendrick Lamar, name-drops other influential African-Americans like Vivica and Mannie Fresh. In an interview featured on Apple Music interview, 2 Chainz tells Lebron, “I’m sure you know, you’re just a different breed in so many ways. You use your platform different from any other person that’s been on your level.”

5. A&R as mood and emotion.

LeBron’s role as executive producer isn’t the traditional A&R role. Rather, he offers input and suggestions. It his idea to have “Forgiven” featuring Marsha Ambrosius sit at the top of the track-list. Most artists would save the heavy stuff for later in the album, maybe even as  the closer, but LeBron advised 2 Chainz to draw in audiences in on first listen. As LeBron states: “It sets the mood from an emotional standpoint.” Elsewhere, LeBron came up with the idea of releasing additional tracks through a deluxe edition down the line — like “Whip” featuring Travis Scott, in which he sings: “They really wanna keep us outside / ‘Cause you know we go way too live, too turnt up for your club.”


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About Julia Brakhage

Julia Brakhage is the owner of Tournament Control™, a consulting firm providing information management services including websites, newsletters, databases and tournament registration, scoring and cash award calculation. Julia has over thirty-seven years of experience in information and business management. Over twenty of those years have been spent working directly with sportfishing tournaments and tournament series. Her systems have been used to register over 9,000 fishing teams, 44,000 anglers, and to distribute over $76 million in cash awards. To learn more about Julia visit www.tournamentcontrol.com.
17 Apr 2020

Golf Cart Raffle Tickets on Sale!

By |2020-04-17T13:37:46-05:00April 17, 2020|

Each year the VBBT raffles items that have been donated to the tournament. The proceeds from these raffles go to support one of our many charities. We're kicking off this [...]

23 Mar 2020

Teams are Signing Up!

By |2020-03-29T12:11:07-05:00March 23, 2020|

The 2020 tournament season is warming up! Invitations were mailed late February and about a third of the invitees have responded. View the current Team List to see who's responded [...]

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My hot and happening SA startup picks for 2019 [Opinion]

Featured image: From left to right, Yoco founders Bradley Wattrus, Katlego Maphai, Carl Wazen and Lungisa Matshoba (Supplied)

There are many startups making waves in the country, but there are a select few that stand out, with massive potential, run by some very impressive entrepreneurs.

I polled some top investors and spoke to Ventureburn journalists Stephen Timm and Daniel Mpala to get their views on what they think are the hot and happening startups for 2019, Here then, is a non-exhaustive list:

Aerobotics — is a startup to watch closely. The Cape Town-based agritech startup is a data analytics platform providing data drawn from satellite imagery and drone flights to monitor farmers crops and warn them about potential risk. Last year the startup took part in Google’s Launchpad Accelerator, launched its bid for the US market and in 2018 landed funding in a round led by Nedbank Capital (see here, here and here).

Bank Zero – few people in this country are enamoured with their banks. They charge exorbitant and confusing fees on accounts and investments, and are basically a monopoly of six. Enter Bank Zero. The 45%-black-owned, app-driven bank wants to disrupt the established banking cartel with the core belief that “South African bank customers currently pay too much for basic banking services.” It wants customers to pay “little to nothing for basic banking”, only paying for added features. What has made the industry sit up and take notice is the involvement of former FNB CEO, Michael Jordaan – who now runs and investment company (see here).

Here are a few hot and happening SA startups for 2019

Yoco – Many have seen the Yoco credit card terminals at retail outlets. In what was arguably one of the biggest venture capital deals announced in 2018 in South Africa, the point-of-sale payments provider (whose founders are pictured above) claimed to have raised $16-million in a round led by a Silicon Valley-based VC firm. Yoco says it services more than 25 000 small businesses, processing more than R3.4-billion in payments annually. Unlike most banks, Yoco doesn’t charge a monthly fee, and transaction fees get smaller the higher a merchant’s turnover. Yoco is also easy to do business with. A quick call revealed a simple and clear fee structure. When contacting the big banks for fee comparisons, with the exception of Nedbank, I became lost in a maze of call centres with staff unable to give me direct information on fees. For Standard Bank, I waited 10 minutes on the call to their merchant services department, and just gave up. Yoco will certainly be giving the banks a run for their money (see here and here).

Click2Sure – is a disrupter in the insurance industry which claims to be among “the first, on a global basis” to digitise the whole insurance journey from distribution to administration and management. It claims to
remove most of the steps in the traditional insurance process, and make the experience simpler and more convenient. It is still a baby of a startup but is founded by the impressive Daniel Guasco, formerly of Groupon (see here).

Pineapple – Another insurtech play that allows you to insure belongings by just snapping a picture of them with your phone. Premiums users pay go straight to a “Pineapple Wallet”, which is used to help pay the claims of the Pineapple community. At the end of each year, money leftover in the wallet can be withdrawn in cash. Last year the startup was accepted into the US based Hartford InsurTech Hub. Pineapple announced it had secured R5.2-million in seed funding from the Hannover-Re Group Africa in return for a 25% stake (see here and here).

Giraffe – runs a web platform that matches job seekers with job placements with a few twists. Earlier this year the Joburg-based startup closed a second funding round in which one investor partner bought a share of between R10-million and R20-million. The startup also won the prestigious Seedstars World competition for emerging startups in 2016 (see here and here).

JUMO — Last year the Cape Town based fintech startup was the first to be selected by Google for its Launchpad accelerator. Since inception in 2015, the company has grown from seven to 300 employees in just two years, and has development offices in Cape Town, Nairobi and Portugal. In 2018 the startup landed a whopping $52-million funding deal, with founder Andrew Watkins-Ball locating to Singapore to help the company enter new Asian markets (see here).

Special mentions go to social enterprise sector startup, Lumkani, which seeks to address the challenge of shack and slum fires in urban informal settlements in South Africa and across the globe. Ikeja is another under-the radar-startup Wi-Fi tech company focused on providing solutions for ekasi and rural areas.

Another startup worth keeping an eye on is Quicket, a fast-growing local online ticketing startup taking aim at the very poor competition we currently have in the local market.

Lastly, there is Sensor Networks, a startup helping insurance companies improve risk, enhance loss management and better engage with customers through smart sensors via an Internet of Things platform of connected

Have we missed one out? Let us know in the comments section below.

Matthew Buckland is an investor, entrepreneur, founder of This column was compiled with additional reporting from Ventureburn journalists.

Disclosure: Matthew Buckland is an indirect investor in Quicket via a local VC fund.

Featured image: From left to right, Yoco founders Bradley Wattrus, Katlego Maphai, Carl Wazen and Lungisa Matshoba (Supplied)

Matthew Buckland: Publisher

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Right you are, Ken (vespa59) wrote,
Right you are, Ken

They send us a toe, and we're supposed to shit ourselves with fear?

My phone started ringing rather unkindly at six this morning. I ignored it. It rang again at 7, and then at 7:05. A voicemail was left. It rang again at 8. All the calls were from a blocked number, of course.

The voicemail said the following:

"Hahaha well it's exactly 7:05 AM. Do you know where your stalker is? On a lighter note, I have a joke for you. Why did the monkey fall out of the tree? Because he died! Why did the second monkey fall out of the tree? Peer pressure! Why did the third monkey fall out of the tree? BECAUSE I FUCKING SHOT HIM WITH MY SQUIRT GUN AND HE DIED!"

I did my usual check outside before leaving for work. Blue chevy parked across the street with a dude in it, talking on a cell phone via headset, and looking through papers. It looked like way too many papers to be game documents, but I was suspicious of him nonetheless.

I crept down to the garage and let the dog out back. When he was done, I queitly pushed my motorcycle to the garage door (the killer surely knows I ride a scooter by now). I turned on the very conveniently located hose spigot and got the nozzle ready. Just to be sure, I exited the garage through the side door to have a look around. The dude in the Chevy was looking directly at my house! I went back in and decided I was heavily armed enough to face him. The MaxD was in my tank bag, and I had two little guys - one in each pocket, plus the hose. I aimed the hose at the garage door and opened it. Nobody was there waiting for me.

When the moto was warmed up and ready to go, I took off, shutting the garage door behind me. I took a left and went halfway down the block, and then turned around and came up the other way... just in case he was telling someone where to follow me.

A well-timed green light at 19th let me get out of the neighborhood quickly and once again, I live to see the first part of the work day.

I have to go to a lunch later for a new coworker and I'm a bit nervous. I'd hate to get nailed in a restaurant in front of all my peers.
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Business Wire

Covetrus Announces Changes to Senior Management Team

Covetrus ™ (NASDAQ: CVET), a global leader in animal-health technology and services, today announced several changes to its senior management and regional leadership teams.

Effective January 7, 2020, Mike Ellis has been promoted to executive vice president and will add North America to his existing responsibilities as the leader of Europe. David Hinton has been promoted to executive vice president and will add global sourcing to his existing responsibilities as the leader of APAC & Emerging Markets. Georgia Wraight has been promoted to executive vice president and will continue to lead Covetrus’ Global Technology Solutions organization, which was formed in November 2019 following the combination of the company’s Global Software Services and Global Prescription Management business units. Matthew Leonard will transition into an advisory role and depart as the company’s global supply chain officer and executive vice president and president, North America.

In addition to these senior management team changes, the company is also introducing a new organizational framework in Europe that centralizes the larger regions into three geographic groupings – Northern Europe, Central Europe and Central Eastern Europe – to simplify operations to better meet the needs of customers and manufacturer partners.

  • Northern Europe , which includes the United Kingdom, Ireland and France, will be led by Jamie Tattersfield, vice president, Northern Europe. Jamie most recently served as the managing director of Covetrus United Kingdom and has had roles within the U.K. veterinary supplies business, including at legacy W. & J. Dunlop Ltd. (“Dunlops), for more than 30 years.
  • Central Europe , which includes Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands and Belgium, will be led by Thomas Friedl, vice president, Central Europe. Thomas most recently served as the managing director of Covetrus’ DACH region and has had a number of roles of increased responsibility in the animal health and medical device industries over the last 25 years.
  • Central Eastern Europe , which includes Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania, will be led by Karolina Brodziak, vice president, Central Eastern Europe. Karolina most recently served as the managing director of Covetrus Poland and has had a number of roles within the company’s Polish distribution business of animal health products and services, including at Medivet, for approximately 20 years.

The vice president of each geographic grouping as well as the managing director of Covetrus’ Spain and Portugal business will report to Mike Ellis.

Covetrus is also announcing the hiring of Simon Hellams, effective February 12, 2020, to serve as vice president and managing director, Australia and New Zealand (ANZ). Simon has had a number of successful leadership positions over the last two decades in both the animal health and agribusiness sectors in the ANZ region, including for Ruralco Holdings, Boehringer Ingleheim and Merial. Simon will report to David Hinton.

About Covetrus

Covetrus is a global animal-health technology and services company dedicated to empowering veterinary practice partners to drive improved health and financial outcomes. We’re bringing together products, services and technology into a single platform that connects our customers to the solutions and insights they need to work best. Our passion for the well-being of animals and those who care for them drives us to advance the world of veterinary medicine. Covetrus is headquartered in Portland, Maine, with more than 5,500 employees, serving over 100,000 customers around the globe. Learn more at .

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain statements that are forward-looking within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, and that involve risks and uncertainties, including statements about our future financial and operating results including 2019 guidance, and other matters. We may, in some cases use terms such as "predicts," "believes," "potential," "continue," "anticipates," "estimates," "expects," "plans," "intends," "may," "could," "might," "likely," "will," "should" or other words that convey uncertainty of the future events or outcomes to identify these forward-looking statements. Such statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to, risks associated with our management transition; the ability to successfully integrate operations and employees; the ability to realize anticipated benefits and synergies of the transactions that created Covetrus; the potential impact of the consummation of the transactions on relationships, including with employees, customers and competitors; the ability to retain key personnel; the ability to achieve performance targets; changes in financial markets, interest rates and foreign currency exchange rates; changes in our market; the impact of litigation; the impact of Brexit; and those additional risks and factors discussed, including those discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K filed on March 29, 2019 and Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed for the quarter ended September 30, 2019, and in our other SEC filings. Our forward-looking statements are based on current beliefs and expectations of our management team and, except as required by law, we undertake no obligations to make any revisions to the forward-looking statements contained in this release or to update them to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of this release, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements.

Nicholas Jansen, Investor Relations | (207) 550-8106

Kiní Schoop, Public Relations | (207)550-8018

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Vital People in Print: Full o’ Beans Preschool

Full o Beans preschool Saanich Neighbourhood Place

Living in Victoria is expensive, and most families need two incomes to get by. That means that they also need affordable childcare. Full o' Beans Preschool through Saanich Neighbourhood Place makes daycare in the Tillicum neighbourhood affordable and flexible. They hope to expand the program to offer full-time daycare and infant daycare in the near future.

Read more about the program in the December issue of Boulevard Magazine (pages 92-93).


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Friday, August 7 2020

Writing about Ho Chi Minh is not easy

Update: December, 06/2015 - 03:11

Established poet Hoang Nhuan Cam received the State Award for Literature and Arts in 2012. He also won the first prize in a poetry contest launched by Van Nghe (Literature and Arts) newspaper and the Viet Nam Writers Association Award. Cam is also known as a veteran playwright, with historical films like Dem Hoi Long Tri, Ha Noi - Winter 1946 and The Scent of Burnt Grass under his belt. His latest movie, Nha Tien Tri (The Prophet), is no exception, as it is about late President Ho Chi Minh. His film, along with 19 others, is up for the Golden Lotus Award at the 19th National Film Festival being held in HCM City from December 1 to 5. Nguyen Thuy Binh speaks to Cam about the new movie and his interest in historical fiction.

Inner Sanctum: Mui Co Chay (The Scent of Burnt Grass) earned you the Best Script Award at the 17th National Film Festival in 2011, and four other important awards such as the Best Script at the Golden Kite by the Cinema Association in 2012. What do you expect to win at the 19th National Film Festival?

First of all, I'm glad to take part in the 19th National Film Festival, which will have a large number of movies from state-own and private studios.

I am working with Viet Nam Feature Film Studio I. I am working as the playwright in The Prophet and as the editor in two other films which are also competing at the festival.

Honestly, I hope The Prophet will be awarded at the festival. This year many good films are competing for the awards. This excites me because the fiercer the competition, the more valuable the award.

Hope belongs to everyone. Many artists say they don't hope about awards. I think that is not honest. When artists attend the film festival, they will have not just joy, but also hope.

Personally, it's great for anyone whose films win an award at the festival.

Some young artists say their creativity is not for winning awards. I think it is not really true because while awards are not the most important thing, they can be an encouragement for artists. Awards help them to be recognised by their colleagues.

I think a national award will also help the artist in being confident of developing his career in his own way.

Inner Sanctum: You spent nearly 10 years in completing The Prophet's script. Why did it take such a long time?

Many Vietnamese filmmakers have made movies about late President Ho Chi Minh to highlight his noble character. However, they never mentioned his prophecy about the revolution in Viet Nam and the world.

I wanted to focus on his prophecy in The Prophet. I nurtured the idea of writing the script very long ago, probably when President Ho passed away in 1969. At that time I wrote a poem entitled Mua Thu Toi Yeu (Autumn I Love), expressing my deep-felt sentiments for him.

I don't know when his image and the image of the revolution in autumn became embedded in my mind.

Writing about President Ho Chi Minh is a challenge for any artist. But it is also an honour.

I have collected about 1,000 stamps of Ho Chi Minh and thousands of his pictures.

Writing about Ho is not an easy task because there are too many historic events to cover.

I had to go on field trips to historic places where Ho Chi Minh lived. It was very moving to touch his belongings or stay in his stilt house. It inspired me a lot and I wrote quickly.

This proves that artists need to go on field trips before they create something. Reality is attractive and inspires artists a lot, especially filmmakers.

It is necessary to love characters to write a script truthfully and successfully.

Inner Sanctum: The Prophet has been directed by veteran Vuong Duc. Does the movie satisfy you?

In The Prophet, there is a moving scene. A soldier picks up a map that has a draft plan to attack Viet Bac (northern mountainous Viet Nam) and the French determination to take Ho Chi Minh alive.

The soldier runs through the forest, battling with the French vehicles. Finally, he gives the map to the Vietnamese military headquarters and breathes his last.

In another scene, Ho Chi Minh comes to a prison camp and sees a female prisoner, who is feeling very cold. Ho Chi Minh takes off his coat and gives it to her.

When I write about Ho Chi Minh, I try to portray him as a simple person to highlight his greatness.

Well-known actor Bui Bai Binh played President Ho. I like his acting very much, especially in a scene that shows the president conferring the title of 'General' on Vo Nguyen Giap. In the script, I depicted Ho Chi Minh as telling Gen Giap with tears in his eyes, "Van, I know you prefer taking a pen to a gun. Reluctantly, you are a General."

All scenes show Ho Chi Minh's nature.

Inner Sanctum: Why did you want to focus on Ho Chi Minh's prophecy?

In a historic book Ho Chi Minh wrote in 1941 in the six-eight-metre poem style, he said Viet Nam would be independent in 1945.

In another instance, during the World War II, he said besides the Soviet Union, there would be many other socialist countries.

In early 1968, he predicted that Americans would only yield after they lose a battle in Ha Noi.

In 1960, President Ho said the north and the south of Viet Nam would unify.

In the 1947-48 period, the French launched a major offensive against the northern mountainous province of Cao Bang, the very cradle of the resistance war. President Ho Chi Minh wrote in his short story entitled Giac Ngu 10 Nam (Ten-Year Sleeping) that Ha Noi would be liberated without fierce battles.

It is true our beloved Ha Noi was liberated on October 10, 1954, thanks to the Geneva Accord and the French withdrawal from Ha Noi. History proves that all his prophecies came true.

Inner Sanctum: You joined the army in 1971 when you were a second-year student at the Ha Noi University. Have you been obsessed with the war?

I remember my teacher in Ha Noi University's literature department. He saw us off to the battlefield. I was told later that my teacher burst into tears after our bus left. He didn't know when his students would return.

Many other Vietnamese soldiers and I preferred a pen to a gun.

I have been obsessed with the war. My older son, who is a second-year student of filmmaking, told me that his first movie would be about me being obsessed with war. He has seen me walk in my sleep sometimes and taking a bottle of Coca-Cola from the refrigerator to give to my imaginary comrade.

Inner Sanctum: Is that the reason why your scripts are always about history?

I'm a native of Ha Noi and want to write about my beloved capital. In The Prophet, I wanted to highlight Ho Chi Minh's military genius. He was a military leader but loved peace.

I still want to write about Ho Chi Minh and I think he is alive in Vietnamese life.

I continue to write about soldiers. I'm preparing to write a script about soldiers in modern life and the integration progress. It will tell the story of soldiers on two sides, their messages and what they want to say about war. It will be about sharing, sympathy and forgiving. It is about being human, the only thing that can heal the world. — VNS

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Table of Contents

Multi Your Threading #6 - The Age of Radeon has begun

The usual disclaimers

Hello again, everyone

As implied by the number in the title, this post is part of a series I’ve been writing on technologies for parallelisation and heterogeneous computing.

This chapter is actually a good point to jump in. It’s part recap, part benchmark shootout and part me explaining how I’ve changed every thing.

That said, I won’t go into much detail about the specifics of the implementations or the core concepts. If you’re interested in that, check out the previous posts on the series. In them I talk about:

In chapter #3 I also talk about Heterogeneous Computing / GPGPU / running arbitrary code in your video card in general. So if you’re new to the idea, it’s worth a check to grasp some of the key differences.

I won’t show much in this post but the code for all the different projects I use here are available on my repos in Gitlab. Feel free to grab a copy and follow along in your favourite editor (I personally quite like atom)

All that out of the way, time to nerd out with graphs and complaining about computing languages. Just the best of times

Well then... it's been A WHILE

A while back I mentioned that something awesome happened to me. I got a Radeon VII and dropped it in my main rig. And this card is an absolute monster, fanboy squeals all around!

Except… it was too good. As in excessively so. One of my goals with toyBrot is keeping the code as simple as I can, so that whatever is happening in it doesn’t get in the way of understanding the actual parallelisation part. And a simple mandelbrot generator is great for that. But it’s also very difficult to make it in any way costly for a GPU to compute. And with the Radeon VII well… OpenCL was averaging 35ms a run. This is small enough that really it’s hard to get any variation that’s not within your error margin. It didn’t even matter that I had everything as double precision because the Radeon VII actually can do doubles, unlike most consumer GPUs…

So I had to look for a new algorithm, perhaps a new dimension.

Say hello to the Mandelbox

The answer I found was in still a fractal, but a different type of algorithm to the regular mandelbrot. As of now, the old Mandelbrot stuff is deprecated on the repository. All new projects will now use a technique called raymarching to generate a type of volumetric fractal known as a Mandelbox.

By the way, most of the pictures in this post can be clicked for full size if you want

So what's on the menu for today?

The main purpose of this chapter is to introduce the new algorithm. I won’t go into a lot of details about each implementation, but there’s some new particulars.

There’s also been a lot of upgrades. Both my GPUs changed (with a direct upgrade and a sort of sidestep) and projects like ROCm and hipSYCL have been moving quite fast. So this is a good opportunity for me to put numbers in perspective and do a sort of shootout between implementations.

For those who skipped the disclaimer I will NOT be going into a lot of detail about each implementation here, for that please go back to the relevant chapter where I introduced them. Otherwise this’d just drag on forever.

I’m also not doing ALL of the previous 10 implementations. I’ve decided to drop HC C++ and MPI. HC C++, as much as I really like working in it, is not only pretty much dead, it never had much of a chance, the way I see it. It’s C++ AMP but tied to AMD which is walling your garden around a copy of a thing I’m not even sure was that popular (compared to OpenCL and CUDA which are the real deal). AMD has discontinued it and it’s probably going to be entirely phased away once HCC gets dropped off of ROCm.

MPI, on the other hand is  very much NOT dead. But it’s not only fiddly to code in (I know right, so lazy) but I’m also somewhat unable to demonstrate it in action without some sort of cluster. It’s made for spreading work over multiple computers and that’s not the setup I have. I could try and use an online cluster (apparently Intel has some services in that direction) or maybe emulate one with VMs… maybe even try to set one up between this rig and my HTPC (heck, it’s got an FX 8350 and a 1050Ti)… but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. At least not right now. I don’t discard the possibility of coming back to MPI in the future because, as much as it’s difficult to get your head around it and code for it, it’s also super exciting stuff.

Can't stop the march of progress!

All right, time to get into some meat. Before we look at numbers, I’m going to give you the briefest explanation on what Raymarching is. Followed by a non-explanation of what a Mandelbox is, because I don’t really understand it myself, I just know it looks super cool.

So, Raymarching then.

If you use computers (something I assume to be true since you’re reading some nerd talk ab out code on the internet) you probably have painful memories of all the marketing hype around Raytracing back when nVidia was releasing their 11-series GPUs, which got renamed to 20 for no reason… and also 16 at the same time for even less reason….

So the thing with Turing, the architecture behind those cards, that related to that hype was that it has some specialisation for ray tracing which is a class of techniques for rendering images that are really approximation of physics simulation of how light behaves (you simulate photons bouncing around and all). It allows for a lot of fancy effects but it’s very expensive.

Raymarching is NOT that. But it’s somewhat related in a way. Raymarching involves essentially only two things: very simple trigonometry and a “distance function”. The distance function takes a position in space and tells you how far away that point is from “stuff in the scene”. So if your “scene” is,say, just a sphere, that’s the distance from the point to the sphere’s centre, minus the radius of the sphere.

All right, let’s stick with that for a bit

So… the basic trigonometry bit is this:

For each pixel in your screen you take a ray which flies from the origin of your viewpoint and crosses that. Then you march along that direction bit by bit, and wherever you stop, you go back to that distance function and if your distance to the scene (in our case, the sphere) is less than 0 (or really, less than your determined threshold) then you know you’ve hit something. And you can know how far away that thing is, because you’ve been counting how much you moved. Just by knowing these two things, you can already draw some interesting stuff.

Like our sphere
Or this perfectly normal object

Really the trick is in what’s inside that distance function. And this can be made very fast, but it CAN also be slow, which is what I needed.

This weird blob thing is a structure called a “Mandelbulb” which is somewhat of an extrapolation of what a mandelbrot fractal would be if it had volume. Raymarching also has some interesting properties. Because your distance functions are signed, you can compose them in different ways. Essentially painting and playing lego at the same time, but with equations. Some truly nerd stuff.

Just playing around for a bit with the mandelbox and the sphere I can:

Add them together -> min(box, sphere)
Subtract the sphere from the box -> max(box, - sphere)
Or take their interesection -> max(box, sphere)

So yeah, this is some super cool stuff. If you’re into this, I highly recommend checking out Inigo Quilez’ page on distance functions, where he talks a lot about this.

Well, and what about that box thing?

Well, the mandelbox is a weird fractal. It’s “made” by essentially folding space on top of itself, then reflecting it along spheres…. The idea sounds complicated but the code is quite simple. Like the Mandelbrot and the Mandelbulb, it’s an iterative fractal. You can decide how many times you do the operations and it changes how things look (and how expensive it is to generate it).  Here is the entire distance estimator

Other than a bunch of constants, there’s not really a lot happening in terms of code. The one thing to note is that this distance estimator is, sadly, not signed. It always returns a positive value, which is a bit of a bummer and does limit what we can do in terms of raymarching composition. It’s a fun thing to play around with the various parameters for the box. For every project, I’ve put all of them near the top of the main source file. The only thing you need to look elsewhere is the camera’s initial position. It’s a bit of a quick and dirty one but you can tweak the distance from origin in FracGenWindow.cpp, if you wish to look from further away

I based a lot of my initial work and adapted the distance estimator from a series of blog posts by a guy named Mikael Christensen. He goes much more in depth with the fractal stuff. Well worth checking out.

Also worth checking out for the mandelbox specifically is Tom Lowe’s site on it. Wikipedia says he ended up finding the fractal around 2010 and, regardless, there’s some good information there on it

FINALLY: On colouring the mandelbox and getting many pretty pictures

The code that colours the mandelboxes in toyBrot is pretty simple. Whereas the mandelbrot implementations depended only on the number of iterations before escape, for the mandelbox I use two parameters:

 – The number of raymarching steps until a collision with the box

 – The position of the point of collision

If the ray doesn’t touch the box I simply do a background colour. Otherwise, I determine the colour from Hue, Saturation and Value model. The hue is actually based off the Y coordinate of the point. For different colours I just tweak an offset and a multiplier (which makes the image have more or less different colours). Saturation is fixed to some arbitrary value which varies in different implementations and the Value is given by the number of steps taken. Because the ray has to step “more carefully” through crowded regions, this makes all the nooks and crannies darker, giving some automagic shadowing.

Parameters for colouring are also all defined near the top of files, so it’s easy to play around with them.

Cards on the table, numbers on the charts!

For the individual implementations I did the talking and background first and later talked about numbers. We’re going to do the opposite this time. And my times are split per hardware:

All the testing is done on a 1920X and I have both a Radeon VII and a Titan X (Maxwell) on my machine. Neither the CPU nor GPUs are overclocked for the baseline tests. I’ve ran every implementation on each hardware I could. Details further down.

The main event is the “runtime” which is how long the fractal took to be generated. The “setup” component is the time the constructor for the “FracGen” object takes. Normally this does inital setup such as loading code from disk (for OpenCL and Vulkan), picking out the right device, so and so forth….

On a properly designed/optmised program you’d do this only once, I do it every iteration. Speaking of which, all the benchmarked tests were averaged over 10 runs. The “error bars” you’ll see along them the standard deviation from the mean. Essentially how much variation you can expect from those values

And this is a reminder that you can click the images for full size if they’re a bit hard to read

Benchmarking charts

Edit note here:

For a while, OpenMP looked like it had not super stellar performance. By the time I wrote chapter #7 I figured this was cause by the lingering and unnecessary atomic<bool> for h0. Once I got rid of it, it’s pretty much on par with std::threads and std::async

Looking at them like this is interesting to see how they compare. When it comes to speed and their relative to the first place:

1920X shootout
  1.  std::threads + std::async -> 21.170s [+0%]
  2. OpenCL (pocl) -> 24.894s [+17%]
  3. OpenMP -> 26.225s [+ 23%]
Radeon VII shootout
  1. HIP (aomp) -> 968ms [+0%]
  2. Vulkan (amdvlk) -> 980ms [+1%]
  3. hipSYCL -> 994ms [ +2%]
  4. Vulkan (radv) -> 1034ms [+6%]
  5. OpenCL -> 1153ms [+19%]
Titan X Shootout
  1. OpenCL -> 1626ms [+0%]
  2. Vulkan -> 1697ms [+4%]
  3. HIP -> 1862ms [+14%]
  4. CUDA (nvcc) -> 1965ms [+20%]
  5. CUDA (clang) -> 2182ms [+34%]

Well, now… this paints an interesting picture in some situations. Let’s talk more about them, shall we? I’ll go through these in the other I originally published the relevant chapters

Conversion notes, considerations and curiosities

STL Threads and Tasks. Good old C++

Well, these two are pretty much undisputed champions in this round. 17% is a pretty significant gap to second place.

Implementing for STL was pretty straightforward. std::threads was quite simple with no big surprises and std::async was my very first implementation again, where I got to grasps with the raymarching algorithm and started experimenting.

To me it’s really good that STL is reigning supreme here, too. The more STL we have around, the better, though, std::threads IS rather barebones compared to other threading libraries

The one thing of note in the STL implementations is what I call the “oversubscription factor”. When I decide how many tasks/threads I’m going to spawn I do NOT just launch one per core. There’s actually gains to be had by oversubscribing. This could be due to how the main loop is organised. The way I do it is really the most immediately obvious way, with ONE optimisation.

For each line of pixels -> spawn a bunch of threads that calculate some of them

So maybe this is due to pixels taking different times, so some cpus could be idling, maybe…. Definitely not enough for kSysGuard to pick up any slack.  And the optimisation is that instead of thread 0 picking pixels [0,width/numThreads], as in, each thread has a defined section of the line, the threads start together and then they walk +numThreads pixels on the line. So the whole batch moves together. The reason this is better is related to how CPUs preempt what data to fetch. I talk a bit more about this on the original STL chapter

Okay, so something observable is that I get better performance by spwaning a much higher number of threads/tasks than I have cores. Mind you that while this code scales pretty much linearly with threads until you saturate your CPU, growth afterwards is nowhere as high and is somewhat logarithmic. While I don’t have a good explanation for this, it’s something I’ve noticed many years ago and it seems to still be true

The results in this graph are averaged from only three runs, instead of ten. I used to apply an arbitrary oversubscription factor of 4, but after making this graph I went back and changed it to 20 for the benchmark.

You may also notice that the times here are quite low, actually lower than the ones in the main chart.

My CPU still does the thing where it gets progressively worse as I run more and more times. It COULD be that it’s overheating or worrying about it, maybe it’s preventatively downclocking a bit because it keeps topped out for minutes. As mentined, I have it stock (could’ve played with OCing it over the holidays but was coding all of this stuff instead) and it’s watercooled with a quad rad for just itself and the motherboard’s mosfets so temperatures really rise up to around 55C and then my fans just say “lol, no more, thank you”.

Further investigation on this would be required, but it’s true of every CPU implementation. STL is the least affected and throughout the 10 runs I logged for the main chart, std::async’s runtime increased by 600ms and std::threads by 760ms.

OpenMP - Don't be too quick to look down on it

Once again if you’ve missed it, OpenMP’s performance was being excessively hurt by a lingering and unnecessary atomic that was a leftover from early code. Once that was removed, performance was on par with the std::async and std::threads. For more information, check here

So looking at the performance numbers, OpenMP doesn’t look too great.

The issues of the increasing runtime and oversubscription I mentioned in STL are also relevant here. OpenMP is the worse when it comes to increasing runtime. As implied by that massive error bar, the difference between runtime for the first and last run I logged for the chart is over 7 seconds.

Also when it comes to oversubscription, OpenMP behaves differently from the STL facilities. DO NOT oversubscribe OpenMP. I’ve actually removed the option at some point because it slows down to a crawl.

That said, OpenMP remains the super easiest way to parallelise some code. Really, if you’ve never done any of this and have no time to learn anything right now, just go OpenMP. One include, one pragma, two function calls in your regular for loop; you’re done, you’re going to get your massive speed gain from having more than one thread.

As mentioned before, OpenMP can target other things too. AMD’s current/new/future/something compiler for ROCm is called AOMP and it allegedly can deploy OpenMP for either AMD or nVidia GPUs. I say allegedly because I couldn’t get it really working, but it’s something I’d like to examine in the future

OpenCL - Portability is king

Me and OpenCL started off on somewhat of the wrong foot because I was annoyed at the setup overhead but the more I use it, the less I mind that. Once you’ve passed through that barrier, coding the openCL programs themselves is pretty easy. It’s got a good library, types that make sense… and, again, there is value in having your program code as a separate source that’s compiled on the fly. It’s my go to for fiddling with parameters. Plus, it runs on everything.

It was once the fastest on the red side but between me coding better the other things and some of the tech catching up, it’s lost some ground comparatively, but it stills rules nVidia, which is quite hilarious. And the CPU performance through pocl is not bad at all, actually beating OpenMP. So, yeah, I’m increasingly a fan. The caveats in the original post still apply but… dat portability…

It’s also notably got the longest setup times. if you add them up, it doesn’t look quite as good but it’s actually smarter than you’d expect, even with me telling it to load the file and compile the program on every run (they’re class variables, not statics). The first runtime is always quite higher and it lowers down later. If I kept it around, it would only apply to the initial run. Which is why though I time the setup, I don’t lump it in with the runtime for the graphs and all. I’m knowingly doing it wrong

CUDA - Don't embrace proprietary

So I’m a confessed AMD fanboy and I love dunking on nVidia (also Intel but they’re lately either very promising  with their GPGPU stuff or kind of depressing with their CPUs so it’s a bit harder) which is why to me it’s somewhat hilarious that CUDA is the slowest implementation for nVidia GPUs.

Stay away from proprietary software, children.

Sadly my fanboy glee was not complete since CLANG ended up losing to NVCC, but I still liked playing with that. I also learned some interesting things about CUDA.

  • It’s still pretty cool that I came from OpenCL needing to have me translate types and whatnot to just have CUDA read my templates like a boss (after I decorated them and polluted code elsewhere with CUDA includes) which is super nice
  • CUDA cares more about workgroup structure than I first thought. Initially I had my thread blocks being one-dimensional for each line. I actually got a significant improvement in performance by “doing it right” with 16X16 blocks, which made its way into HIP as well.
  • Cuda actually has a nvstd::function type which is pretty much analogous to the STL equivalent. I found this really nice and I’m sure it can enable some awesome clever algorithms. It would be a shame if it was very slow making it really not recommended for usage where it’s not strictly necessary
  • When building CUDA with clang you can have your definitions for __host__ and __device__ as overloads, so you can separate them without resorting to preprocessor mess. It’s a real shame nvcc doesn’t do this. And that nvcc exists in general, tbh (ask your build friend. They’ll agree)

Something that’s less of a fanboy dunk and more of a “confused annoyance” is that CUDA is quite C… I mentioned this before but it REALLY irritated me this time around when I had to debug stuff and for that I had to write a function that calls and interprets cudaGetLastError() because… of course.

What makes it weirder to me is that my understanding is that a LOT of the work that went into the Vulkan C++ headers was contributed BY nVidia, and those are a blessing. But then CUDA, the thing they throw rivers of money in is all C….. eh… Another reason to avoid it when possible I guess =P

HIP - The other CUDA

So when it comes to build and code… HIP is still VERY MUCH “the other CUDA” so there’s not much there to talk about. Performance is getting really good though, but the cost is that ROCm is as messy as ever. Maybe even more so now.

The build side of ROCm is a nightmare. Both in building ROCm itself as well as building stuff with it. I decided to upgrade my install from ROCm 2.6 to ROCm 3.0. I eventually quit because the build was so broken that I have projects trying to clone dependencies with non-existing tags. I mean… if this is happening there can’t be any CI? And this was from me cloning the tag for the release. It’s all over the place…

My luck was that they have a new compiler now, AOMP, and the project for that is kind of a ROCm inside your ROCm, so it has HIP and hcc, and AOMP is a version of the old clang that was there (so the… fourth ROCm clang?). After some massaging I managed to get IT building, and this is what I’ve used. Once it’s up, I got a performance improvement from my previous install (no numbers, sry) but my environment is still all over the place.

Building HIP for nVidia was also a chore. CMake was just not calling the correct things so I had to copy the command lines and finish the build by hand to get some numbers. This is not a real world scenario. Bonus points for hipCC overriding my platform. “Can you please use nvcc? I want to deploy to nVidia” “Sure thin….wait a second, I see you have our clang. I’ma silently use that and ignore your request now”

And as a final note… it’s <current year argument> can we PLEASE stop using environment variables for everything. By all means have them there for defaults but it’s just completely backwards that you cannot tell your tool what to do. The command line is powerful and simple to use. HAVE YOUR TOOLS CONSUME ARGUMENTS.

SYCL - The future of heterogenous computing

The title for this section is really what I want to happen. As much as I gave a lot of praise to OpenCL this here is where I think everyone should be going towards. Both coders and vendors. I know Intel is making a massive push towards it and it actually excites me greatly for Xe. On the other hand, nVidia and AMD are more or less pretending this doesn’t exist.

The implementation of SYCL I use is hipSYCL. It’s a great project that’s been evolving fast. Worth checking out and worth contributing to. It implements SYCL on top of HIP for AMD and nVidia, and also integrates a CPU backend based on OpenMP but this one is more of a curiosity. Because of, I suspect, the OpenMP slowdown with oversubscription, it’s very slow. Which is why SYCL is not on the CPU chart. A different proprietary implementation, ComputeCpp, says it might be able to target my CPU through POCL, so I might give that a go at one point.

SYCL brings in the portability of OpenCL (well, it intends to by building on it and being managed by Khronos) but it’s the most C++ of all the remaining implementations (it’s really only matched by HC C++ which is now dead). There’s no doubt in my mind that in a future where SYCL is an option with comparable performance to the likes of CUDA or HIP, it is the best option.

But it still suffers from implementation woes. My CUDA version of the SYCL program was not running properly and I didn’t really have the time to figure out why. And it’s all growing pains of hipSYCL as a project that moves fast, chases its own goals together with the moving target that is ROCm all while being pretty small.

Vulkan - Flex your nerd muscles

Vulkan would be a third “code once, run everywhere” option (fourth if you count OpenMP). But I struggle to recommend it over… anything normally. Once you’ve got it set up, it’s not super hard to give maintenance. Most of the code in the C++ side now is the same as before. I really just had to tweak ins and outs. The place where I feel let down is that I code the compute shader in glsl and that’s pretty much remembering every line how much nicer it is to code for OpenCL.

The performance is great, though. And I’m curious as to how it’ll evolve. Really what Vulkan consumes is not the GLSL. It consumes an intermediary representation called SPIR (or SPIR-V if it’s supported). I use a tool that comes with the Vulkan toolkit to compiler my glsl code to SPIR, but maybe with better driver support, this could eventually be a richer standard with a more robust tool compiling some better code than glsl.

Not much to add on top of the original post

Maybe I should generate some high-res ones for fancy wallpapers!

BONUS ROUND - extra charts

Before I go, I have a couple extras. First, I built toyBrot at work where my machine has a 1080Ti instead and the power of Pascal is scary.

Reposting the titan just to point out it's like twice as slow always

CUDA is still slower than OpenCL or Vulkan though, even accounting for the setup. Luckily for my fanboy heart all the Turings were busy so my Radeon VII gets to not be crushed. But this is… threatening… time to remind myself that my Radeon VII has a waterblock on it

I was honestly surprised by how strongly it responded. Got me curious to do some rendering benchmarks though I know the difference will be nowhere near as significant.

it IS a pretty significant overclock though, enabled in no small part through the magic of waterblocks.

From a stock 1800MHz GPU clock and 1000MHz HBM clock, I take mine to 2125 MHz [+18%] and 1175MHz [+17%] respectively. And also push the power cap to 300W from the 250W stock

And it’s better than my alternative of sabotaging nVidia by switching erverything to double precision and watching my Titan struggle to keep up with my 1920X.

Parting words and relevant links

And there we go. It’s been a long time coming, but I’m super happy with the new code. Not only I’ve been having a lot of fun just playing around with it but it’s much more flexible it I need to tweak the runtime again. Still some improvements I could make, such as coding a more proper camera and moving the position to be with the other parameters.

Next on the list though, are a couple of entries by the Blue Team. I’ve been asked a long time ago to do tbb and ISPC from intel, so that’s what I’m going to look at. I’m dumping some links here related to raymarching and the mandelbox. For things related to the technology specifics, please refer to the actual post about it.


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Open form Tuesday to Sunday from 2 p.m to 7 p.m
Noctural on Thurdays from 3p.m to 9 p.m
Closed on Mondays and public holidays

The space now dedicated to the shop existed prior to the construction of the Villa Noailles as ordered from Robert Mallet Stevens in 1923.

This space was dedicated to the communal areas at the time of Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles. Then the area was fitted out with a glass roof during the renovation completed in 2003.

It has become a thematic bookstore whose selection varies as the art centre’s programming progresses throughout the year. This place has been enriched by also becoming an extension of the accompaniment of participants in the festivals of fashion, fashion accessories, photography, design and interior architecture.
The bookshop brings together all the editions of the art centre: one catalogue per festival or per exhibition, enriched with special editions and exclusive objects developed by artists for the venue (design, fashion, drawing).
Finally, the Villa Noailles has co-edited in 2018, with Bernard Chauveau éditions, a beautiful book on the patronage of Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, the result of ten years of scientific and historical research.

Indeed, the villa Noailles boutique is dedicated to presenting unique creations, produced in small series, in limited editions by the actors participating in the life of this place in order to give visibility to their creations over several years. It also offers larger editions and collections produced with festival partners ; capsule collections Petit Bateau and Galeries Lafayette for example.

To these are added the remarkable creations of artists with a practice echoing the thematic programming but also the achievements of local craftsmen, producers with local know-how and the enhancement of Provencal heritage.

Since her participation on the fringe of Design Parade Toulon in 2019, Graziella Semerciyan has been contributing to the artistic direction of this shop and the temporary one of Design Parade Toulon. She proposes to match the works of contemporary artists with art, crafts and historical design objects from her gallery selected according to the themes of the exhibitions.

Since 2014 the villa Noailles has commissioned an artist to decorate this space, first in collaboration with other shops, then with artists who chair the juries of its festivals or former finalists of its competitions.
The first development was entrusted to Nouvelle Affaire and the artist Baptiste Debombourg, followed in 2015 by Jogging Marseille and the artist Gio Black Peter, then BLESS in 2017, Vincent Darré in 2018 and finally Pierre Yovanovitch since 2019.

As part of the summer exhibitions of the international interior design festival Design Parade Toulon, a second ephemeral shop is opened in Toulon. In 2016, India Mahdavi at the Micholet mansion, in 2017, Vincent Darré at the Cercle Naval, since 2018 at the former bishop’s palace; Mathilde Vallantin Dulac and Victor Levai, then Les Crafties.

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Love Match: Virgo Man and Aries Woman Love Compatibility

When fire sign Aries and earthbound Virgo combine in a romantic relationship anything can happen, as this is a volatile relationship that can blow hot and cold.

An independent, some say fastidious, Virgo man can be drawn to sparky Aries at first. But after a while, the Aries appetite for adventure can seem uncontrolled and misdirected to Virgo, and he will prefer a good book to you.

Here is everything you need to know about how Virgo man and Aries woman are compatible:

Virgo Man and Aries Woman chemistry

The Virgo man is on a quest to be self-sufficient and useful, so a restless, initiating Aries woman can put a spoke in the works, although Aries has much to learn about boundaries and commitment from Virgo. The brash confidence that Aries exudes is something mutable Virgo could benefit from.

And this will be fascinating and intriguing to a Virgo man who abounds with realistic common sense and duty-bound determination that be enhanced with the addition of some Aries enthusiasm and fire.

Aries is the least compatible zodiac combination for Virgo, but that doesn’t mean these two can’t make a go of it. An Aries woman will find a Virgo man challenging as an enigma that needs to be explored and conquered. Modest Virgo can be charmed and eventually won over by Aries persistence.

Eventually, the many differences that fuel the initial attraction are, sadly, what may drive this couple apart as they get polarized, leading to quarrels, conflict, and broken hearts.

Aries Woman

Aries woman is at her best within a fight. You need a cause to ride into battle for, but Virgo man may find your definition of a worthy cause as a little selfish and all about you. Around a Virgo man you may get tired of hearing that it isn’t about you because as far as you are concerned, everything is about you.

You love a challenge, and if Virgo presents a mystery to you, you won’t be put off by someone who appears to lack sensual fire. Aries is all about bravery, passion, and conviction and you can get a little obsessed about whatever underdog struggle you are championing.

Your theatrical and furious charge through life may be a little too fast and way too undisciplined for workaholic Virgo.

If your fire has been dimmed by fear or pain, Virgo is a healer who can show you how to fan your flames for the common good instead of burning up in anger and negative emotion.

Virgo Man

Your approach to life is fundamentally very different from Virgo’s, and you need to understand what makes him tick if a relationship between you is going to last beyond the initial attraction. The Virgo man is a compassionate and adaptable soul born under a feminine, mutable sign ruled by Mercury.

You can count on a Virgo man to read the fine print and perfectly finish all the dull tasks you never find time for.

Virgo rules overwork, and when a Virgo man is with an Aries woman, this coupling needs a lot of work.

It is worth it if you decide to try. You can benefit from Virgo’s wisdom and ability to heal, as all warriors need some downtime and a place to rest and recuperate.

What Works

Both of you respect and admire honesty and want the truth from a partner, and you share a natural distrust of flowery compliments and falseness.

Virgo can be very critical and can take your criticism with a bit of defensiveness, but you may never learn to live with the nitpicking critical stance that a Virgo man takes on everything about you.

Virgo will thrive if you have his back as he can lack confidence and is his own worst critic. With a Virgo man to guide and help you, an Aries woman can feel like the world was made for her to live in.

This is the right combination of work, but it is not very romantic, that part you will have to nurture with care.

What to Watch for

You may launch an open rebellion against your Virgo man’s controlling, critical and cautious approach to life. He may feel your impatience and lack of limits are a problem for him to solve. Without mutual respect, this relationship is doomed.

The Virgo man can become a martyr in service of your whims, and feel like you take him for granted. You may think the Virgo man lacks tact and is brutally insensitive and he may come to the conclusion that you are foolish and selfish.

You have a very different approach to money and financial issues that could lead to a break in communication. While Virgo wants to talk and analyze, Aries wants action so, in conflict, you can struggle to find common ground.

Around fiery and impulsive Aries, a Virgo man can become a nagger of note and your need to socialize wildly could get cramped by intellectual Virgo’s preference for quieter talks with a few select friends.

The Score

The combination of Virgo man and Aries woman can work but is more suited to a business or working partnership than romance.

If you do try to make a go of it and make the most of your differences, you can find that your strengths work very well in combination, but the keeping the fire alive in the bedroom will always be a challenge,

Understanding your Virgo man is easy if you have the inside track on what makes him act the way he does. Virgo Man Secrets by astrologer Anna Kovach is the in-depth guide you need with all the tips and tricks on how to bring out the best in a loyal Virgo man.

What do you think? Are Virgo man and Aries woman a match?

3 thoughts on “Love Match: Virgo Man and Aries Woman Love Compatibility

  1. This should be interesting. I met an Aries woman. It hasn’t progressed yet but these articles sure give me a little pause. But I don’t think I’m controlling and nagging and she seems more down to earth so we’ll see what happens if it happens.

    1. Hi Mike! Thank you for writing in as a Virgo man interested in an Aries woman. What you need to keep in mind is that the articles are written solely based on sun sign alone. There is a lot more about you and there is a lot more about her that isn’t in the articles because there would have to be birth charts brought up, looked at, and of course, there is always free will. Get to know her as much as you can and by all means, if things progress, you should perhaps purchase her a copy of my book “Virgo Man Secrets” to help her understand you better.

  2. Recently I have been dating a virgo man and as I am an aries the feel that he has been controlling me not as if he want to . As well, he have been saying that i am pretty much self centered, if I try to do my work . All I have to say is that our relationship is not working at all. But he never say anything about breakup and if I ask him then he is like are you serious. Do I still have to be your him ?

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Her Spirit Was Strong..

Good Evening! If you love texture and shimmer you will adore Elisa’s inspiration here on the blog today…

Hi everyone,

Elisa here with my latest mixed media project for you.

A mixed media tag featuring a couple of Visible Image’s background stamps:

the new awesome Fibonacci

and De-Stressed

To create the tag, I started with a heavy base chipboard tag from 2Crafty Chipboard, perfect substrate for a mixed media tag. Next came a background of gesso’d old book paper, torn and distressed.

I then stamped my feature dragon flies, hand coloured with a bit of the gorgeous teal dylusions shimmer spray, and then fussy cut them out and 3d mounted them over my background.

Live In The Moment

I loved using the Cosmic Skies Stencil to create a small and subtle amount of texture for my background. I used a white modelling paste as I find that it doesn’t soak up colour as much as other mediums leaving you with bright colour!

Cosmic Skies stencil

Close ups for the finer details –

That’s it from me today, make sure you leave me some love!
Elisa xx

Wow that turquoise is stunning! Love how you used the stencil.. thanks Elisa! ♡

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Unique spots for time travellers in Kefalonia

Unique spots for time travellers in Kefalonia

Kefalonia island has a long, multicultural history from conquerors of the past that have left traces visible today and has gone through a Great earthquake that totally changed the scene. Half-ruined settlements abandoned since the Great 1953 Ionian earthquake and medieval stonewall castles, all dominated by the power of nature with trees and wild greenery growing through the stones, create the absolute time travelling  sense.  Lets explore them!

Old village of Farsa: The disastrous earthquake in 1953 forced the inhabitants of the Village of Farsa to abandon their settlement in a rush and rebuild their lives a little southern. The ruins of the old settlement stand still, while scattered small objects such as teaspoons, dismembered dolls and broken porcelain indicate the rapidity of the abandonment.

Vlahata Samis:Before the devastating earthquake in 1953, the old village of Vlahata was located near Sami. The settlement was then abandoned by its inhabitants and now rests half ruined among the trees that grow between the wrecked walls. From summer 2012, almost 60 years later,”Saristra production team”, under the creative guidance of “Aigialos” cultural association, revives the “old” village annually, by organizing the Saristra festival on its remains, with performances,  live bands and video art screenings on the ruined walls.

Saint George’s Castle:From 300 meters high, the castle has been keeping an eye on everything since it was built 800 years ago.
It was the place of residence for nobles and officials and has been the capital of Kefalonia for centuries. Within a 600-metre perimeter of walls, ramparts and watchtowers, could spot pirate ships as far as 20 miles away on a clear day. When the capital was relocated to Argostoli in 1757, life in castle faded and all interest in it was lost. Today, the castle is ruined and only a few buildings survive, but still indicate its magnificence. It was not only the damage over time and wars, it also suffered a lot from the disastrous earthquake in 1953.

Assos Castle: Located on top of the Assos peninsula, it is the largest among the two castles in Kefalonia. It was built by the Venetians in the 16th century on the west coast of the island in order to protect Assos village from pirates. The latest inhabitants lived within the castle walls up until the late sixties. They were known as the Kastrini people and were groups of large families who lived from cultivating olives and grapes. The Castle housed more than double the residents of today’s village of Assos with around 200 houses as well as many public buildings. The strategic location of the Castle allowed supervising the whole sea area and from there you can get beautiful view of the bay.

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