|
Volume 2, Issue 3 April, 2007
We begin this issue of OpenSPARC
Community Threads interviewing Professor Jose Renau who is one of
our OpenSPARC board members.
Jose Renau started his career in
information technology as a system administrator at Ramon Llull
University located in Barcelona, Spain where he specialized in
Internet security. However, he found that his interests were in
computer architecture and left system administration to pursue a
career in academia focusing on computer design.
Volume 2, Issue 3 April, 2007
We begin this issue of OpenSPARC
Community Threads interviewing Professor Jose Renau who is one of
our OpenSPARC board members.
Jose Renau started his career in
information technology as a system administrator at Ramon Llull
University located in Barcelona, Spain where he specialized in
Internet security. However, he found that his interests were in
computer architecture and left system administration to pursue a
career in academia focusing on computer design.
Professor Renau has a Bachelor of
Science and Master of Science degrees in computer engineering from
Ramon Llull University, and a Master of Science and Doctorate in
Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Currently, Professor Renau is an assistant professor at the
University of California, Santa Cruz.
CT: Why is
a university professor interested in OpenSPARC?
Professor
Renau: OpenSPARC presents an
interesting project to involve undergraduate students. It is also a
great platform to evolve and test at the graduate research level.
CT: What
do you see as the goals and objectives for OpenSPARC?
Professor
Renau: Currently,
to have an efficient FPGA implementation.
CT: Why?
Professor Renau: We are developing another SPARC core at the
university we call SCOORE for Santa Cruz Out-of-Order Risc
Engine. SCOORE is similar to SPARC Millennium or the Fujitsu
SPARC64. It is capable to fetch 4 instructions per cycle and it can
support over 256 in-flight instructions. We plan to re-use
infrastructure from the OpenSPARC effort to bring up SCOORE.
CT: Where do you see OpenSPARC headed?
Professor
Renau: As a professor, I see
it becoming an ideal tool to do class projects. Students taking
classes on hardware design or computer architecture can develop and
test actual architectural modifications.
CT: Where will OpenSPARC be five years from now?
Professor
Renau: I
would like the research community to work more on real hardware and
less on simulators. Simulators are essential, but I would like to
see around 10 to 25 percent of the work based on real hardware.
Without OpenSPARC it is very difficult to achieve that goal because
of the high effort to develop a platform. Thanks to OpenSPARC,
researchers can re-use most of the infrastructure and propose, as
well as evaluate their improvements.
CT: What is one key accomplishment you would like to see this
year?
Professor
Renau: Establishing
the OpenSPARC Center of Excellence at the University of California,
Santa Cruz. (See Announcement below on this subject.)
CT: Are there any improvements you would like to see with the
OpenSPARC initiative?
Professor
Renau: Simplify and clarify
the process to share OpenSPARC improvements. While software
development has a clear mechanism for sharing development, we need to
establish the same mechanism for sharing hardware developments.
When Professor Renau isn't teaching at
the University of California, Santa Cruz, he is into foodtourism
which he defines as traveling to different places to try their local
food. This is specially interesting when traveling in foreign lands.
Professor Renau also likes fun cars to drive and is a proud owner of
a yellow Mini-Cooper. Possibly, Professor Renau can challenge Robert
Ober, our other board member with an interest in cars, to a race!
Announcements
OpenSPARC Turns One This past March was the first
anniversary of OpenSPARC since our launch in 2006. It has been an
amazing year - over 4700 downloads of the OpenSPARC T1 RTL,
derivative designs by Simply RISC and Polaris Micro, ongoing EDA tool
vendor support and use, election of the OpenSPARC Board of Governors,
and a the establishment of a worldwide community interested in our
OpenSPARC initiative.
Given this great start, one can only imagine what advancements will
be made in the second year of OpenSPARC.
OpenSPARC Center of Excellence Presentation On April 12th,
Sunil Joshi, Vice President at Sun Microsystems, presented Professor
Jose Renau of the University of California, Santa Cruz with a plaque
commemorating the establishment of the first OpenSPARC Center of
Excellence. This Center of Excellence establishes a collaborative
partnership between Sun and UCSC faculty who are working with the
OpenSPARC community and promoting OpenSPARC in academia and research.
OpenSPARC T1
V1.4 Adds FPGA Support
OpenSPARC T1 v1.4 adds significant new functionality, as well as
new platform support in its hardware offering. On the design side,
v1.4 adds the capability to create a single core, signle thread
implementation of the OpenSPARC T1. This is useful to create
multi-core designs that do not include hardware threading.
Additionally, v1.4 also provides an option to create a FPGA
implementation from the base design. This FPGA option creates a fully
synchronous design with better utlization of on-chip FPGA resources
like block RAMs and multipliers. Finally, v1.4 includes an option to
remove the Stream Processing Unit (SPU) from the design. Since the
SPU is essentially an on-chip hardware accelerator for algorithmic
functions, one can choose to remove it in more general purpose CPU
implementations.
Although the three options described above can be chosen
independently from one another, combining them allows users to create
an FPGA implementation with the smallest possible area foot-print.
Support for verification environment for these new additions also
have been added, as well as elementary suport for netlist
verification through vector playback.
For more details, check the OpenSPARC T1 Processor Design and
Verification User's Guide contained in the doc directory of
the OpenSPARC T1 v1.4 distribution
OpenSPARC T1 v1.4 can be downloaded from
http://opensparc-t1.sunsource.net/download_hw.html.
OpenSPARC at Multicore Expo OpenSPARC hosted a number of
presentations at this year's Multicore Expo held at the Santa Clara
Convention Center, Santa Clara, California. Rick Hetherington, Chief
Architect at Sun Microsystems, presented his views on the direction
the industry is moving increases in the number of cores and
number of threads per core on a single integrated circuit. Durgam
Vahia, OpenSPARC Engineering at Sun Microsystems, presentation on his
experience on moving the OpenSPARC T1 to a FPGA implementation was
well received and generated much interest. Finally, Fadi Azhari,
Director OpenSPARC Marketing at Sun Microsystems, presented an update
on the OpenSPARC experience after one year. You can download these
presentations from
http://www.opensparc.net/publications/presentations.
New Additions
to the Cool Tools If you
click on the download link http://cooltools.sunsource.net/coolstack,
you will notice that there are new additions to the Cool Tools stack.
Specifically, Apache 2.2.3, PHP 5.2.0 (Hypertext Preprocessor), and
MySQL 5.0.33 are now available. Additionally, there are new compiler
options that can achieve even higher levels of optimization and
performance. The tools in the Cool Stack now install in the
/opt/coolstack directory.
Upcoming Events
44th
Design Automation Conference
June 4-8, 2007
San Diego
Convention Center
San Diego,
California
http://www.dac.com/44th/index.html
2007 Federated
Computing Research Conference (FCRC)
June 8-16, 2007
Town and Country Resort and Convention Center
500 Hotel Circle North
San Diego, California 92108
http://www.acm.org/fcrc/
Help Wanted
We continue to
look for contributors to OpenSPARC Book. If you are interested, look
over the outline at 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
|
