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Volume 2, Issue 1 January, 2007
Continuing with our theme of interviewing each OpenSPARC Board member,
in this issue of OpenSPARC Community Threads we interview Robert Ober.
Volume 2, Issue 1 January, 2007
Continuing with our theme of interviewing each OpenSPARC Board member,
in this issue of OpenSPARC Community Threads we interview Robert Ober.
Robert Ober is a Fellow in the Office of the CTO at LSI Logic. He has 25
years experience in processor and system architecture. Previously,
Robert was a Fellow in the Office of the CTO at AMD responsible for
mobile and embedded platform solutions and wireless strategies. Robert's
experience includes intimate knowledge of the PowerPC, StrongARM, and
ARC processors, as well as experience in the development of CDC, Cray,
and SPARC supercomputers.
Closely related to our OpenSPARC community is Robert's involvement in
the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) non-profit association dedicated to
research to develop a $100 laptop a technology that could revolution
how we educate the world's children. He was one of the founding board
members and was influential in its technical evolution.
Robert holds an honors Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc.) in Systems
Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
CT: Robert, what do you see as the goals and objectives for OpenSPARC?
Robert: Sadly, as a processor architect, the value of processors is
diminished. Differentiation is at the system level and processor
extensions or implementation details. Just as open source community has
benefited from Linux as a non=differentiated underpinning to all the
value they add, it's time for a processor model that is the same.
OpenSPARC is an outstanding candidate, and Sun has generously offered
it. 1GHz system-on-a-chip processors are now common in embedded
applications. I would like to see OpenSPARC find a home in many of those
applications all the way from single core to multi-core, multi-thread.
CT: Why?
Robert: The industry needs it so that it can be free to focus on the
real problems and innovations just as the Linux community has produced
a flowering of software systems based on it all the way from tiny
embedded to telecommunication grade, transaction grade and high-end
computing clusters.
CT: Where do you see OpenSPARC headed?
Robert: Obviously, my focus and interest is in industry. I can see
OpenSPARC fitting in many places. I would expect it in the 10gigE family
of switches and routers, as well as enterprise storage appliances. But,
it's also true that a single core could be very interesting paired with
Linux in consumer and embedded devices. I also see this as a great gift
to the education community.
CT: Where do you think OpenSPARC will be five years from now?
Robert: I am always frustrated by how long things like this actually
take. Let's face it it's easily a year to tape something out, often
much longer to be qualified an have a system wrapped around it. We'll be
lucky to have a few implementations out there in five years. Hey, maybe
in the next OLPC.
CT: Are there any improvements you would like to see with the
OpenSPARC initiative?
Robert: It's just started really. I'd like everything to improve. More
industry interest, more use, more variations available for people to us.
Architectural extensions? I don't know. It should be very interesting.
When Robert isn't working on processor strategies for LSI and helping us
as an OpenSPARC board member he can be found at home with his wife,
three young boys and two dogs. His real interest outside of work is
driving his Lotus Elise. As he states It's obscenely fun to drive!
Thank you Robert allowing us to get to know you better.
Announcements
OpenSPARC Selected as a Finalist for 2007 DesignVision Award
OpenSPARC has been selected as a finalist for the DesignVision Award in
the Semiconductors and ICs category. Presented by the International
Engineering Consortium, the third annual Design Vision Ward recognizes
technologies, applications, products, and services judged to be the most
unique and beneficial to the industry. The winner will be announced on
January 31st at the DesignCon 2007 Exhibition and Conference held at
the Santa Clara Conference Center in Santa Clara, California.
More Awards Sun's Sun Fire T2000 server powered by the UltraSPARC
T1 (OpenSPARC T1) won the gold award 2006 Products of the Year from
the SearchDataCenter.com. Also, the Sun's T2000 design team was selected
as an 2007 EE Times ACE Award Finalist for design team of the year.
Congratulations!
OpenSPARC Sun NetTalk Visit the OpenSPARC web-site
(http://www.opensparc.net) and check out the latest Sun Net Talk on
OpenSPARC. In this informative Net Talk, you'll learn what's behind the
world's first open source CPU and the dynamic OpenSPARC community.
Listen in as the expert panelists explore the many opportunities that
OpenSPARC offers developers and designers.
As a follow up to this Net Talk, you can join a live question and answer
session with Sun engineers on OpenSPARC at 10:00 Pacific Standard Time
(PST) on Wednesday, January 31^st at the OpenSPARC Expert Exchange See
details below in our Upcoming Events section.
First OpenSPARC Board Meeting Held This past December the first
OpenSPARC board meeting was held. The board adopted the proposed
charter, now officially known as the OpenSPARC Charter. With this
charter the board is now officially known as the OpenSPARC Governing
Board (OGB). You can view the meeting minutes and subscribe to the
OpenSPARC Governing Board mailing list through the OpenSPARC web-site
(http://www.opensparc.net).
OpenSPARC FPGA Demonstration Sun's OpenSPARC team, together with
Xilinx, presented the current status of their effort to port the
OpenSPARC T1 core on FPGAs at the RAMP workshop held at this University
of California at Berkeley earlier this month. RAMP Research
Accelerator for Multiple Processors is a joint effort among six
universities constructing an emulation infrastructure for future
research in parallel architecture and programming. The outline of the
talk included a quick primer on OpenSPARC T1, optimizations for the FPGA
port, initial results with Xilinx Virtex 4 technology and system
integration of T1 on Xilinx's ML411 board. For more information on the
RAMP project see http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu.
OpenVZ Virtualized Linux Available for UltraSPARC T1 The OpenVZ
project, the force behind SWsoft's Virtuozzo virtualization technology,
announced that it has ported it OpenVZ software to run on Sun's
UltraSPARC T1 processors.
Landscape of Parallel Computing An interesting paper The Landscape
of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley was published last
month and is now available on the OpenSPARC web-site
(http://www.opensparc.net/publications/technical-papers/the-landscape-of-parallel-computing-research-a-view-from-berkeley.html).
Better yet, listen to Dr. David Patterson present this paper in person
at Stanford University's EE Computer Science Colloquium on January 31st.
See details below in our Upcoming Events section.
Upcoming Events
DesignCon 2007
January 29-February 1
Santa Clara Convention Center
Santa Clara, California
http://www.designcon.com/2007/
OpenSPARC Expert Exchange
January 31 10:00 Pacific Standard Time
Live talk between the participants of the OpenSPARC NetTalk including
Darryl Gove, Dave Weaver, Shrenik Mehta, Fadi Azhari, and Simon Phipps
Sun Microsystems Inc., Menlo Park, California
https://communications.sun.com/dialog/eeeventindex.do
Stanford University Electrical Engineering Computer Systems Colloquium
January 31 16:15-17:30 Pacific Standard Time
The Berkeley View: A New Framework and a New Platform for Parallel
Research
Dr. David Patterson, University of California Berkeley
Stanford University, Stanford, California
http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/
International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) 2007
February 11 - 15
An 8-Core 64-Thread 64b Power-Efficient SPARC SoC
U. Nawathe, M. Hassan, K. Yen, L. Warriner, B. Upputuri, D. Greenhill,
A. Kumar, & H. Park, Sun Microsystems Inc.
A Single-Cycle-Access 128-Entry Fully-Associative TLB for Multi-Core
Multi-Threaded Server-on-a-Chip
S. Shastry, A. Bhatia, & S. Reddy, Sun Microsystems Inc.
San Francisco, California
http://www.isscc.org/isscc/
Tenth Workshop on Computer Architecture Evaluation using Commercial
Workloads - CAECW-10 (immediately preceding the 13th International
Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture HPCA-13)
February 11
CMP/CMT Scaling of SPECjbb2005 on UltraSPARC T1
D. Kaseridis & L. K. John, The University of Texas at Austin
Phoenix, Arizona
http://trappist.elis.ugent.be/~leeckhou/caecw10/
Help Wanted
We continue to look for contributors to OpenSPARC Book. If you are
interested, look over the outline at http://wiki.OpenSPARC.net 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
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
.
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 http://www.opensparc.net.
The OpenSPARC Team
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