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Volume 1, Issue 5 October, 2006
The OpenSPARC Advisory Board was
officially announced earlier this month. This inaugural board is
comprised of five members with a wide background across our industry.
Please meet our new OpenSPARC Advisory Board members
Volume 1, Issue 5 October, 2006
The OpenSPARC Advisory Board was
officially announced earlier this month. This inaugural board is
comprised of five members with a wide background across our industry.
Please meet our new OpenSPARC Advisory Board members
- Nathan
Brookwood, Principal Analyst, Insight 64 - Nathan's career in
the information technology industry spans decades. He has worked on
the development of an array of hardware and software systems, as well
as product and strategic marketing efforts. In 1998 Nathan founded
Insight 64, where he works with clients who value his unique blend of
marketing and technology skills of the semiconductor market and
allied systems markets.
- Robert Ober,
Fellow, Office of the CTO, LSI Logic Corporation - Robert has 25
years experience in processor and system architecture. In the course
of his career he had been involved with the design and development of
PowerPC, StrongARM, ARC and AMD embedded processors. Robert was also
one of the founding board members of the One Laptop per Child
non-profit effort and influential in its technical evolution (see
http://laptop.org).
- Simon Phipps,
Chief Open Source Officer, Sun Microsystems Inc. - Simon is Sun's
advocate in the open source communities promoting consistency and
best practices, as well as actively participating in the global
conversation open communities express. He has over 20 years in the
computer industry working as an engineer, programmer and systems
analysts. Simon became fascinated by the idea of "action at a
distance" when he worked with OSI standards in the 1980's on
commercial collaborative conferencing software.
- Jose Renau,
Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of California
Santa Cruz - Jose's current research focusses on a variety of
computer architecture advancements. These include design effort and
complexity estimators, chip multi-processors, energy/performance
trade-offs, thread level speculation, processor-in-memory, and
checkpointed architectures. Jose earned his Ph.D. Degree in Computer
Science for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
- David Weaver,
SPARC Architect, Sun Microsystems Inc. - David has been involved with
the development of the SPARC architecture since he joined Sun over 20
years ago. In this time, he has been involved with the publication
of every SPARC architecture specification and has served as chairman
of SPARC International's Architecture Committee. David is charged
with overseeing consistency and binary compatibility of Sun's SPARC
implementations.
The first order of business for the new
OpenSPARC Advisory Board will be to adopt an OpenSPARC Charter (see
the OpenSPARC draft charter at
http://www.opensparc.net/opensparc-charter.html)
at which time they will become the OpenSPARC Governance Board with
the goal of managing and directing the OpenSPARC community in it
efforts to improve upon and advocate in favor of OpenSPARC (see the
excellent write-up on OpenSPARC governance by Simon Phipp in his blog
at
http://www.opensparc.net/blogs/2006-10/simon-phippsopensparc-governance.html).
Announcements
OpenSPARC
Tutorial - Please join us
during ASOLOS XII at the San Jose Hilton Hotel this coming Saturday,
October 21st from 9:00am to 12:15pm for a tutorial on
"Innovating with OpenSPARC". Moderators for this tutorial will
be David Weaver and Shrenik Mehta from Sun Microsystems Inc. This
tutorial will provide information for building systems and software
using the OpenSPARC design. Members
of the OpenSPARC T1 development team will present an introduction to
OpenSPARC T1, including:
- Overview of OpenSPARC processor architecture (changes since SPARC V9) and OpenSPARC T1 microarchitecture (processor organization, pipeline, threading model)
- SAM-T1 simulation tools for OpenSPARC (architecture model, full-system simulation platform, device models, device driver development, trace generation, user interface, etc.)
- Virtualization on OpenSPARC: Porting "your" operating system on top of the hypervisor
- Maximizing the benefits of CMT with CoolTool development tools (compilers, GCC, etc.)
- Creating optimal SPARC executables using the Automated Tuning System (ATS). Sign up now at http://www.princeton.edu/%7Easplos06/index.html
Mobile Interest - The Homebrew Mobile Phone Club invited the
OpenSPARC team to its monthly meeting to discuss interest in using
open source designs and the tools to develop and test new innovations
in mobile technology. This new organization's purpose is to provide
support and guidance for individuals building their own "convergence
devices".
OpenSPARC
Momentum Announcement - Of
interest to the OpenSPARC community in the OpenSPARC announcement of
October 2nd is "the OpenSPARC initiative is showing
significant momentum". Since the RTL source was made publicly
available this past March, there have been over 3500 OpenSPARC T1
hardware downloads and 2600 OpenSPARC software downloads. We are on
our way in growing our OpenSPARC community, but need to continue this
fine start!
Open Profiles
- Starting in the next month's issue of OpenSPARC Community Threads
newsletter, we will be adding a new section - "Open Profiles".
Open Profiles will spotlight the activity of one individual within
our community and tell how he/she is helping to advance the OpenSPARC
initiative.
65nm OpenSPARC T1 -
In case you missed it in the prior issue of the OpenSPARC
Community Threads newsletter a new OpenSPARC project has been
created. Thanks to the work done by Professor Jose Renau and his
students from the University of California Santa Cruz 65 nm synthesis
work has been contributed to this OpenSPARC project. These scripts
take the OpenSPARC T1 RTL as input and synthesizes them to gates
using the Synopsys Design Compiler. Using TSMC technology available
to universities from Synopsys, the design can be run at 950 MHz with
no caches.
Upcoming Events
ASPLOS XII -
Twelfth International Conference on Architectural Support for
Programming Languages and Operating Systems
October 21-25
"Innovating with
OpenSPARC"
David Weaver &
Shrenik Mehta, Sun Microsystems Inc.
Hilton Hotel, San
Jose, California
http://www.princeton.edu/~asplos06/index.html
OOPSLA 2006 -
International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems,
Languages, and Applications
October 22-26
Oregon Convention
Center, Portland, Oregon
http://www.oopsla.org/2006/
Multicore Expo -
Japan
October 31 -
November 1
"The OpenSPARC
Initiative"
Steve Rudinsky,
Sun Microsystems Inc.
Hotel Laforet
Tokyo (Shinagawa Ward), Tokyo, Japan
http://www.multicore-expo.com/
A-SSCC 2006 -
Asian Solid-State Circuits Conference
November 13-15
"The UltraSPARC
T1: A Power-Efficient High-Throughput 32-Thread SPARC Processor"
Ana Sonia Leon,
Sun Microsystems Inc.
Hyatt Regency
Hangzhou, Hangzhou, China
http://www.a-sscc.org/
Multicore Expo -
Germany
November 14-15
"The OpenSPARC
Initiative"
Constantin
Gonzalez, Sun Microsystems Inc.
New Munich Faire
Centre (part of Electronica 2006), Munich, Germany
http://www.multicore-expo.com/
Help Wanted
We continue to look
for contributors to OpenSPARC Book. If you are interested, look over
the outline at wiki.OpenSPARC.info
and start contributing. Collective help from the community will
advance the OpenSPARC Book's "publication".
Give us your
feedback! We want to improve the OpenSPARC web-site and want to hear
from you on any thoughts you may have regarding potential projects
and improvements. You can reach us at
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.
Help us get linked!
We want to spread the word and get new members involved. Grab a
button at http://www.opensparc.net/buttons.html.
Please feel free to forward this
newsletter to all your friends and co-workers. Also, check out the
latest OpenSPARC news at www.opensparc.net. |
