Another cool bit if hardware for database training.

It's sometimes hard to adopt quickly the new opportunities world provide. I'm being reading now Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen. Thanks to Ellias for the advice, it really seems like a good book.

The interesting thing is that author starts with a description of hard drive industry as the fastest one with innovations going faster than customer needs. And, what do you think? Hard drive industry strikes back with SSD drives. Well, I read they exist but didn't understand their value for acoustic model training. Even without profiling it's clear they will be extremely useful. 

Say you have a medium size acoustic database of 60 hours of few gigabytes size. If you want to process it fast you need to use 8-core machine. Here comes the bottleneck, imagine 8 processes reading the feature vectors from a disk in an almost random way. No need to guess hard drive will be very busy trying to fetch all data required. SSD could definitely help here, I really need to try it soon.