Hello,
Just to let folks know that registration is now open for this month's
meeting, which will also be our second anniversary! And with thanks to
SK Pang for kindly sponsoring OSHUG this month.
Cheers,
Andrew
--
OSHUG #18 — Energy-efficient Computing (Open Compute, BeagleBoard,
Event-driven XCore)
On the 26th April 2012, 18:00 - 20:00 at Centre for Creative
Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG (51.529049,
-0.116436)
// Sponsored by SK Pang Electronics: http://www.skpang.co.uk //
- Registration: http://oshug.org/event/18
At the eighteenth OSHUG meeting we will hear how open source
collaboration is being used to transform data centre design, and how
open source hardware and software have been used to enable low cost
ARM development. It will also be the OSHUG 2nd anniversary, and two
years on we are delighted to welcome back XMOS, who will be giving us
an introduction to event-driven programming with XCore.
— The Open Compute Project
Facebook uses a lot of servers, and those servers use a lot of energy.
To minimise the costs associated with those servers and data center
facilities, Facebook engineers came up with a fresh design. To build a
community around that design it has been open sourced via the Open
Compute Project (OCP). OCP is now involved in taking the requirements
of many large data center users, and turning them into designs for
servers, the racks that hold them, the facilities that power and cool
them, and the management interfaces that control them. This
presentation will give an overview of what Facebook have built, and
how OCP plans to transform data centers elsewhere.
Chris Swan has been an electronics hobbyist and software hacker since
primary school. These days he's an IT guy at a large bank, focussed on
security and innovation - including mobile, consumerisation and cloud
computing. Alongside his day job Chris chairs the infrastructure
working group at the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), which is
partnered with the Open Compute Project (OCP).
— BeagleBoard.org Community - Open Hardware, Open Software, Open Platforms
BeagleBoard.org has created a number of products since its conception
a few years ago, from the initial 'BeagleBoard' single board computer,
through to the enhanced 'BeagleBoard-xM' with more performance and
connectivity, and its most recent and expandable platform, the
'BeagleBone'. All of these have set out to achieve a goal of bringing
high performance ARM-based processing technology to a wide 'community'
of developers and users, in low-cost 'open' platforms, giving access
to as much of the system-on-chip features as possible. The recent
launch of the 'BeagleBone' was a great testament to this vibrant
'community', key to Beagleboard.org, which enabled a wealth of
advanced platform and application software to be immediately
available, and a large amount of hardware expertise providing feedback
and ready to start building add-ons and clones. This was exactly what
was hoped for when the project was initially conceived by a couple of
engineers discussing at the coffee machine about how their technology
could be made more widely accessible. The community continues to grow
each day, with more and more exciting and innovative uses for these
low-cost, open platforms revealed on the various mailing lists and
chat rooms - from 'football playing robots' to 'media servers', the
list, expertise and imagination seems endless!
This presentation hopes to give an overview of the BeagleBoard.org
community project and how the products have been created and
supported. There have been many exciting moments, many challenges and
many lessons learned throughout this project - some of which will
hopefully be covered during this presentation and discussion.
Roger Monk is a System Applications Engineer for Texas Instruments,
and has spent the last 10+ years working closely with customers to
build hi-tech electronic products based around Texas Instruments
Embedded Processing technology across a range of application areas.
Roger is passionate about open-source technology and the ability for
it to help deliver higher quality, more innovative products to market
quickly. He has been closely involved with the BeagleBoard.org
community project since its conception.
— Event-driven Programming with XCore
XMOS designs concurrent, event-driven processor cores. Because of the
deterministic nature of the architecture both real-time algorithms and
hardware interfaces can be developed as software. The event-driven
nature of the processor means that all programs pause until they need
to perform a task, making them inherently efficient.
In this talk we will discuss events, concurrency, and how hardware
interfaces can be programmed in software. We will then show the design
of the slice-kit development system, which enables XCores to be easily
attached to peripheral PCB's containing, for example, an Ethernet PHY.
Henk Muller is currently the Principal Technologist at XMOS Ltd. In
that role he has been involved in the design and implementation of
hardware and software for real time systems. Prior to that, Henk
worked in Academia for 20 years in computer architecture, compilers,
and ubiquitous computing. He holds a doctorate from the University of
Amsterdam.
Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:00 - 18:20 as the event will start
at 18:30 prompt.
- Registration: http://oshug.org/event/18
