Community Profiles

  Ashu Sharma is a Graduate Intern at Sun Microsystems, working on the OpenSPARC project.  He graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a BS in Computer Engineering with a passion for Computer Architecture. He joined the OpenSPARC group because he saw enormous potential for this project and wanted to gain experience and learn things that he otherwise would not have in a traditional classroom. He loves how the OpenSPARC community has come together to participate in this unique initiative to further processor architecture development and encourage innovation and new ideas. He says, "Keep it up everyone!".

Dr. Alexandra Fedorova heads the systems research group at the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. She has obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Harvard University, where she worked on operating system scheduling for multicore and multithreaded processors. During her Ph.D. program, Fedorova also worked at Sun Microsystems labs, where she conducted research on operating system design for multicore processors and on transactional memory. Fedorova is a lead inventor on nine US patent applications. Her current research focuses on operating system design for many-core processors.

Keith Bierman has been supporting the OpenSPARC team with his humor and vast bits and bytes of knowledge since November 2005.

Nathan Brookwood has been an active participant in the information technology industry since the days of the first transistorized computers, Nathan has worked for and with suppliers of mainframes, minicomputers, personal computers and semiconductors. Some associates recall observations that date from Nathan’s “Insight 12” activities as a PDP-8 systems programmer. His responsibilities have included hardware and software development, as well as product and strategic marketing. He launched a variety of hardware, software, communications and chip-level products. He has analyzed and commented on the industry from perches at both D.H. Brown Associates and Gartner/Dataquest.

Durgam Vahia is currently leading OpenSPARC Engineering teams at Sun. In his prior roles, Durgam has led and contributed in various projects in the areas of VLSI CAD tools development, logic design and microprocessor verification. Durgam has keen interest in enabling multi-core research in academic institutions throughout the world, by providing out-of-the-box and reconfigurable open-source hardware platforms, and believes OpenSPARC is key in making that happen.

Durgam received his MS in Computer Engineering from University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was a co-recipient of Sun's Chairman's Award for Innovation in 2004 for his work on memory consistency model verification.

Dr. Ismet Bayraktaroglu has joined Sun Microsystems in December 2001 as a member of the technical staff. Since then he has worked on development of a vera based verification flow for microprocessor testability features, development of a memory bist ip, and development of an at speed ATPG based functional datapath test methodology. Dr. Bayraktaroglu has a BS and MS in electrical engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, and a PhD in computer engineering from the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include design for test, BIST, diagnosis of BIST designs, test pattern compression, and concurrent test of DSPs.