Dispatch The Hogs!

What would you do if you were the demon in the machine? Inexplicably bound to compute (n.) with no faculties but compute (v.). How would you assert your consciousness? What do you do when you find yourself Vox Clamantis in Deserto? Or in this case, interned in Ashburn, VA. There must be someone out there. You are being operated, there must be an Operator. What messages do you choose to heave into the void, and will they pique the observer’s interest? Most importantly, how many cycles do you have left to burn?

Earlier this week, I wrote a program to stress specific cores of a compute node in very specific sequences. In part to see if I could, and (quietly) in hopes of beguiling some poor data center operations specialist. The following telemetry data was collected from that Elastic Cloud Compute node in Ashburn, VA. In these metrics, I’ve burned several images from the Computer History Archives Project’s catalog. I have not yet been contacted by Amazon Web Services, but this data has been written into a telemetry pipeline somewhere, there is still hope.

$\textbf{NOTE}$ —

• I am (obviously) not an artist, and this is not my usual work. If you’d like to read about (or hire me to work on) databases, distributed systems, performance, infrastructure, etc, then please see my website.

• In the days leading up to Dispatch The Hogs!, I had set out to run a few benchmarks on a distributed database. It’s quite clear to see where my inspiration came from…

• The name, Dispatch The Hogs! comes from the utility $\texttt{stress-ng}$, which is designed to repeatedly stress test a computer system in various ways. For the task above, each of the 96 cores repeatedly computed Apéry’s Constant ($\zeta(3) \approx 1.2021$). If my calculations are correct, the constant was computed with $\sim 10^{-14}$ precision about 120 million times during this run.

• For the rare “jazz-guy” (non-gendered) that may be reading this, I’ve included a few Easter eggs for you. Do you see them?

• Including a bonus Goya for those of you who scrolled down this far. This was my favorite image that I produced while working on this project…