Schlomo Schapiro

The  Velocity Europe 2011  is coming closer, only two weeks to go! If you have not yet signed up, do so now and use the discount code veu11pcy  to get 20%  discount off the regular price. The code can be entered on the Velocity registration page . We managed to put together a Birds of Feathers event just on the afternoon before the velocity. This will serve as a warm-up to the Velocity and provide the open space that the main Velocity does not have this time. Meet the vibrant Berlin web community at the Betahaus , a well-known location for start up companies. Attendance is free for Velocity attendees! As is the dinner & party after the event :-) Go to the  Velocity Eruope 2011 Birds of Feathers event page at veubof2011.eventbrite.co.uk  to see all the details and sign up, the event is limited to 150 participants.

Sukkot was really great this year. We had lots of guests, lots of food (no wonder when the holidays fall on Thursday and Friday) and, most of all, perfect weather. It was not too cold, mostly even above 10° C during the day and we could sit in the sukkah every day and evening! I don't remember such a good weather since we came to Germany, so this is really remarkable. Our small balcony sukkah Come and visit us next year!

I recently attended the first TechTalk of Telekom' DeveloperGarden in Berlin. It was about GPU computing, a topic that relates to GPU-based image scaling as Apache module . The speaker, Guido Juckeland , is a heavy user of GPU computing and works at The Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing at the Dresden Technical University . The talk was quite interesting for GPU computing newbies like me. It gave a solid overview and showed the different programming styles that can be used (CUDA and OpenCL). It conveyed a lot of best practice with regard to GPU computing and several important points to consider before starting. The most important aspect is to keep the PCIe bottle-neck in mind:  Moving data between the CPU and the GPU is very slow compared to moving it between the main memory and the CPU or the GPU and its memory. Therefore, in most cases it is not efficient to offload a computation to the GPU if the data is used only once. The speedup of the GPU-b