David Dalrymple writes about low-level systems topics: assembly, kernels, virtual memory, and unusual programming experiments like brute-forcing 8-queens.
HN commenters link it for the 8-queens overkill post and the operating-system critique; the author replied to criticism by pointing to a footnote.
Following 9 months of computation and 4 petabyte of disk IO on a Dell PowerEdge R280 server
I wonder if the time could be improved by optimising the programs some more, since at this scale constants matter a lot. The amount of memory needed might not be reducible but optimising a tight loop and reordering it to take advantage of cache effects could yield nontrivial speedups.
Taking advantage of the very wide new instructions in recent CPUs might also be worth it, instructions which compilers often have difficulty figuring out how to use effectively:
http://davidad.github.io/blog/2014/02/25/overkilling-the-8-queens-problem/
I included a footnote to address this criticism.
http://davidad.github.io/blog/2014/03/12/the-operating-system-is-out-of-date/#fn:8
Would it be this one?
http://davidad.github.io/blog/2014/02/25/overkilling-the-8-queens-problem/