Applied experiments
Domain-specific systems: recipe versioning, genomics data, smart agriculture, multilingual media, privacy tooling, and other workflows that are really software problems in disguise.
- DuckLake on One Machine
I put a small DuckLake, DuckDB, and marimo data platform through one complete job, from 200,000 to 100 million events.
- Five 4K60 Streams Were Fine. The Sixth Was Not.
A paced NVDEC-CUDA-NVENC pipeline found the live-video capacity boundary and showed why a NumPy round trip cost more than the CUDA work.
- The Radio Won't Wait for Your FFT
A paced I/Q replay found where an eight-core SciPy pipeline began missing deadlines and dropping blocks, and how far an RTX GPU moved that boundary.
- I Wrote the Same GPU Operation Six Ways
Six implementations of one row-scoring operation show why a 324× resident GPU kernel becomes 10.4× once host-device transfers are included.
- I Moved an Entire ML Pipeline to the GPU
A complete GPU ML pipeline reached 4.74× at one million rows, while transfer costs and tiny inference batches often kept the advantage on CPU.
- 100 Million Points on One GPU
GPU spatial joins crossed by one million points, a rectangle barely won at 100 million, and one quadtree setting silently lost matches.
- How Many Queries Pay for a Vector Index?
CAGRA searched vectors up to 76× faster than exact cuVS, but its index build required roughly 45,000 queries to amortize.
- How Much of a Spark Plan Actually Runs on the GPU?
One late CPU island barely hurt a Spark RAPIDS plan; two separated islands made the hybrid execution 33% slower than CPU.
- DuckDB, Polars, and cuDF on One Analytical Pipeline
Across 100,000 to 200 million rows, GPU joins crossed early, strings never crossed, and partitioned Polars handled data larger than VRAM.
- When Does GPU Parquet Actually Pay Off?
Five Parquet readers show cuDF leading large scans, PyArrow keeping two small projected reads, and projection mattering more than engine choice.
- Not Every FLAC Is Lossless
Some FLACs are transcoded lossy files and some hi-res tracks are upsampled CDs. Spectral inspection can test what the metadata merely claims.
- I Sequenced My Family. We Still Don't Have an Answer.
I sequenced two families and built a rare-disease analysis pipeline. The work produced lessons about evidence and uncertainty, but no diagnosis.
- The Pipeline Behind Sequencing My Family
The engineering behind a family exome analysis, from scan assembly and FASTQ/BAM/VCF processing to read validation and reference-population gaps.
- Why I Generated Slower Speech Instead of Stretching Audio
Fresh speech synthesis preserved sharper consonants than phase-vocoder stretching in 27 of 30 pairs, but extreme slowdown introduced new artifacts.
- What a 200-Line Keras Tutorial Left Out
A 3D-CNN tutorial ran in minutes; applying it to real brain MRIs took months and 25 GPU-hours to reach 61% accuracy against a 52% baseline.
- What Multiplayer Netcode Taught Me About Distributed Systems
Building multiplayer netcode forced me to handle latency, authority, stale state, correction, and ordered events long before I used those terms in data systems.
- The GPU Collision Detector That Didn't Get Faster
A CUDA collision detector was no faster at the tested scene size because of memory layout, transfer costs, divergent work, and coarse timing.