Grasping linux by the horns.

Grasping linux by the horns.

I’ve wanted to run a full node on the iota tangle for about 20 months now but have been put off by the hurdles (I completely failed the KYC of one german ISP obviously being a dodgy IOM customer) and costs associated with renting a suitably specced dedicated linux server.

But things have been slowly falling into place this year.

I attended an Isle of Man Tech Club seminar in February, entitled “An Introduction to Docker and Kubernetes”, and have had various conversations with an academic friend of mine who has been building processor clusters using networked raspberry pi’s.

….. and I have been trying to get my head around machine and deep learning and neural networks …. try to wrap your head around this …..

More recently I have seen the business opportunity of the sort of statistical data analytics provided by data scientists to e-gaming companies and other businesses that have significant amounts of customer (big) data containing trends and patterns that mere mortals cannot access unless assisted by new software technologies such as hadoop (data storage and processing) and docker (containerisation and clusters), for example, and hardware vendors such as Nvidia embracing this next BIG opportunity (after PC gaming and bitcoin mining) by making sure that their GPU’s are at the forefront of this exciting new space.

Therefore I was pleased to find that after I had set my ageing gaming notebook up to boot into Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, that not only is the GTX 970M GPU (that has eased me through many hours of Fallout 4 and Assassins Creed Odyssey) “cuda” compatible, it has 1,280 cores!

So, excited sufficiently (if you know me it doesn’t take much), I’m going to roll with this space for a while and see where it takes me.

Today I ordered an AI development box – Intel Core i9 9900K, 64GB RAM, 11GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, 1TB M.2 SSD, 4TB HDD, Ubuntu 18.04.

And as the kids pointed out, if it all goes belly up, I’m going to be left with a very impressive gaming platform.

And, I might get my full node up and running too!

Watch this space… I am.

PS. For the record the mountain biking and paragliding in July was in Les Arcs, not Morzine, and it was ace until I got food poisoning!

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