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Parallella: spare chips
by Jeremy Bennett 31 Oct '12

31 Oct '12

Hi all, For those who haven't seen, Parallella got funded on KickStarter - a total of just under $900k raised. For those who would like to hear more, I'll be talking about the project at OSHUG on 15th November. As part of my reward package, I'll receive 8 Epiphany III (16-core) bare chips in December. I have neither the skills or facilities to use these, so I am open to any OSHUG suggestions for putting them to a good use. I'm sure some of you have both the skills and facilities to do something creative with them. Best wishes, Jeremy -- Tel: +44 (1590) 610184 Cell: +44 (7970) 676050 SkypeID: jeremybennett Email: jeremy.bennett(a)embecosm.com Web: www.embecosm.com

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Parallella countdown.
by Andrew Back 26 Oct '12

26 Oct '12

Hello, As you know Jeremy will be doing a talk at the next OSHUG meeting on the pretty amazing Parallella project, which is currently live on Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for… The campaign has started gathering a bit more pace over the last ~24 hours, but it's currently just under $150K off the funding target and with only 32 hours to go. So, if you fancy a dev board with 16x or 64x Epiphany cores, dual-core ARM A9 and programmable logic, and were thinking of making a pledge now is a good time! Cheers, Andrew -- Andrew Back http://carrierdetect.com

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OSHUG #22 — Embedded (Erlang, Parallella, Compiler Options and Energy Consumption).
by Andrew Back 25 Oct '12

25 Oct '12

For the benefit of anyone that's not on oshug-announce and that may have missed this... Cheers, Andrew // OSHUG #22 — Embedded (Erlang, Parallella, Compiler Options and Energy Consumption) 15th November 2012, 18:45 - 20:30 at Erlang Solutions, New Loom House, 101 Back Church Lane, London, E1 1LU, UK. Sponsored by Electronics, Sensors, Photonics KTN: http://www.espktn.org — Registration: http://oshug.org/event/22 Embedded systems continue to grow in importance as they play an ever-increasing role in everyday life: more computing is done on the move as smartphone functionality catches up with desktops and services move to the Cloud; the Internet of Things is set to herald an age in which networked objects create and consume data on our behalves. These, and many other applications, are driving an insatiable demand for more powerful and energy-efficient embedded solutions. At the twenty-second OSHUG meeting we will hear how Erlang can be used to bring concurrency to multi-core embedded systems, we will learn about the Parallella project which aims to make parallel computing accessible to everyone, and we will hear about vital research into optimising compiler options for energy-efficiency. - Erlang Embedded — Concurrent Blinkenlights and More! Managing the resources and utilising the increasingly popular multi-core and heterogeneous aspects of modern embedded systems require new sets of tools and methodologies that differ from the traditional C/C++ flow. Erlang provides features that are highly relevant to solve these issues and yet it is pretty much unknown in the embedded domain — which is surprising considering that it was originally designed for embedded applications at Ericsson! This talk aims to provide an overview of Erlang and the current state of its usage in the embedded domain and talk about our plans to help speed up the adoption rate of Erlang in embedded projects. Omer Kilic works on Erlang Embedded, a Knowledge Transfer Partnership project in collaboration with University of Kent. The aim of this project is to bring the benefits of concurrent systems development using Erlang to the field of embedded systems; through investigation, analysis, software development and evaluation. Prior to joining Erlang Solutions, Omer was a research student in the Embedded Systems Lab at the University of Kent, working on a reconfigurable heterogeneous computing framework as part of his PhD thesis (which he intends to submit soon!) Omer likes tiny computers, things that 'just work' and real beer. - Parallella — Supercomputing for Everyone The Parallella computing platform is based on the Adapteva Epiphany processor. Implemented in 65nm or 28nm silicon, Epiphany offers 16 or 64 cores and delivers up to 50 GFLOPS/watt, and the entire Parallella board complete with a dual-core ARM A9 host will consume around 5 watts. This talk will present the Epiphany architecture and explore the challenges of developing an effective GNU tool chain, and discuss the use of open source, and an approach to engineering that developed one of the fastest chips in the world from concept to second generation silicon for just a few million dollars. Dr Jeremy Bennett is the founder of Embecosm, and an expert on hardware modelling and embedded software development. Prior to founding Embecosm, Dr Bennett was Vice President of ARC International PLC and previously Vice President of Marconi PLC. In his earlier academic career, he pursued academic research in computer architecture, modelling and compiler technology at Bath and Cambridge Universities. He is the author of the popular textbook "Introduction to Compiling Techniques" (McGraw-Hill 1990, 1995, 2003). Dr Bennett holds an MA and PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University. He is a Member of the British Computer Society, a Chartered Engineer, a Chartered Information Technology Professional and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. - Measuring the impact of compiler options on energy consumption in embedded platforms Energy efficiency is the highest priority for modern software-hardware co-design. The potential for compiler options to impact on power consumption of running programs has often been discussed. However there has never been a comprehensive analysis of the magnitude of that impact, or how it varies between processor architectures and compilers. This presentation will describe a project undertook during the the Summer of 2012 at the University of Bristol Department of Computer Science and funded by Embecosm, to explore the effect of compiler options on energy consumption of compiled programs. The talk will discuss the accurate measurement of power consumption on a range of small embedded systems. The whole setup was under control of an XMOS board, making it possible to run the tens of thousands of tests needed for statistical robustness in just a few weeks. The results of these tests will be discussed, the implications for compiling embedded systems, and the potential for future research in this area. This research was unusual, in that it was funded as a completely open project. A wiki detailed progress from week to week, the relevant open source communities were kept regularly informed, and the results will be published in open access journals. The talk will also cover the issues around funding and running an academic research project in this manner. James Pallister is a graduate of the University of Bristol, where he achieved joint First Class Honours in Computer Science and Electronics. During the summer of 2012, he led Embecosm's research program into the impact of compilers on energy consumption in embedded systems, which was a development of James' work at the University of Bristol with the XMOS multi-core processor. Mr Pallister has returned to Bristol in October 2012, where he is studying for a PhD in low-power multi-core system design. He remains a Technical Advisor to Embecosm. Simon Hollis is a lecturer in the Microelectronics Research Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol. His interests lie in the creation of energy-efficient embedded systems, processor interconnects and parallel languages and run-times. He is the creator of the RasP and Skip-link Networks-on-Chip, and is currently working on the Swallow many-core system, which targets 480 processing cores in under 200W. A main aim of the research is to re-investigate the memory/communication balance in large scale computing systems. Note: Please aim to arrive for 18:45 or shortly after as the event will start at 19:00 prompt. — Registration: http://oshug.org/event/22 -- Andrew Back http://carrierdetect.com

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Re: [oshug] The Parallella project
by Jeremy Bennett 02 Oct '12

02 Oct '12

On Fri, 2012-09-28 at 19:30 +0100, Alan Wood wrote: > Wow this is an interesting and very cool kickstarter project. > > I am a little puzzled though that there are not any good languages for > Parallel/concurrent development in their open source suite or even > listed, I would expect to see something like XC (C extensions for > concurrency) at a low level and maybe OCCAM/Go or Erlang at a higher > level, surely this is crucial for success, the hardware is only a > small part of the story (I know this from my own work). Hi Al, XC and Occam are very much for a transputer/XMOS model of computation. Not clear they apply to an Epiphany architecture. But other parallel languages sound like a good idea. Omer Kilic is the local Erlang expert. Go should not be difficult, given we already have a GNU back-end. Best wishes, Jeremy -- Tel: +44 (1590) 610184 Cell: +44 (7970) 676050 SkypeID: jeremybennett Email: jeremy.bennett(a)embecosm.com Web: www.embecosm.com

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An other free platform ?
by Roland Laurès 02 Oct '12

02 Oct '12

Hello, I'm new here, I worked before only in the proprietary world. I started to think about a project in my new company (called Gnuside) that could increase the open source hardware world (not meaning it will be a huge advance, but it will (I hope) contribute) : We are about to design a hardware containing those general characteristics : - a ~1GHz dual-core CPU (here is he main node of my question) - 1 or 2 GB of DDR2/3 - 16 GB of flash for the system - SATA controller (which will be populated by 2 hard-drives in the public delivered release) - 2 or 3 ethernet 1 Gbps ports - COM port - a programmation/debug port. Why I'm talking about that ? We plan to put a Freescale processor of the family of P102x, from what I heard this processor has it's documentation available for everyone, and seems a good choice for an open source hardware platform. From what I heard ARM processors which are in the center of many open source hardware platforms are not that easy to use for open source community. Are PPC better ? I was at first thinking about the future T2080 which put back the Altivec solutions and a new architecture and packet engines that seems promising, but everything about them are under NDA. Even if this could be circumvented by writing some open source test programs around the basic functionalities of the CPU, would it be a big problem for the community ? What do you think about all this ? I'm asking that to better know how to manage an open source hardware project, without messing things up. Regards Roland Laurès PS: The project using this platform will be Firstbrick and has a hardware and software part, and I'm managing the hardware part.

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The Parallella project
by Jeremy Bennett 29 Sep '12

29 Sep '12

Hi all, If you haven't seen it, the Adapteva Epiphany low-power multi-core processor is going open source, funded by a kickstarter project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for… The Parallella board will cost $99 and offer 50 GFlops/Watt, consuming a maximum of 5 Watts. We've been heavily involved with the Epiphany project since 2008. The team at Embecosm built the GNU tool chain and more recently we've funded research at Bristol University looking at the impact of the compiler on energy consumption. I'll be talking about Epiphany at the next OSHUG meeting. It is revolutionary, not only in its design and performance, but in the founder's commitment to open source and the way it has been funded right from the beginning. We'll have one there for you to look at! My colleague James Pallister, will be talking about how compilers can influence the power consumed by a processor, and sharing the results of his open research project at Bristol. He'll have the results for the ARM M0, M3 and A8, XMOS and Eiphany processors. Look forward to hearing people's ideas of what might be possible with a $99 board with this sort of horsepower! Best wishes, Jeremy -- Tel: +44 (1590) 610184 Cell: +44 (7970) 676050 SkypeID: jeremybennett Email: jeremy.bennett(a)embecosm.com Web: www.embecosm.com

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The openness of the RPI
by Sevan / Venture37 26 Sep '12

26 Sep '12

http://whitequark.org/blog/2012/09/25/why-raspberry-pi-is-unsuitable-for-ed… I must admit this is why I kept away, but after playing with one at oshcamp thanks to Omer, I ordered one as I can run FreeBSD on their currently, not fussed about GPU support as im running the pi headless but I was unaware that the GPU is critical to system initialisation & support is mandatory. If I can have a functional userland with a headless pi it means I don't have to have bigger box using lots of electricity for testing/dev. Sevan

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Agenda timing OSHUG Camp 2012
by BAGLEY SIMON 11 Sep '12

11 Sep '12

Are there details of the talk times, and the finish time on the Saturday? Simon

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OSHCamp 2012 update.
by Andrew Back 10 Sep '12

10 Sep '12

Hello, I just wanted to let folks know that OSHCamp is now at half capacity with 50 people registered and over a month still to go. So if you are planning to attend it may be advisable not to leave it to the last minute to book. With regards accommodation, for those that prefer the comforts of a B&B or a hotel: The Angeldale is very central and quite reasonably priced: http://www.angeldale.co.uk/ The White Lion Hotel is perhaps a bit more upmarket, the food looks great and I can vouch that the beer is well kept: http://www.whitelionhotel.net/ And groups may wish to consider booking an apartment (although you could also book a 4 bed room at the hostel): http://www.croftmill.com/ As ever, happy to answer any questions direct or via the list. Cheers, Andrew PS. We have a 10th talk confirmed for the Saturday, on the OpenRelief CTOL open source UAV airframe (which will be brought along!)

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Porting FreeBSD to embedded hardware
by Sevan / Venture37 09 Sep '12

09 Sep '12

MIPS specifically but mentions of ARM & PPC too, talk is by FreeBSD commiter Adrian Chadd at the NYC BUG. http://www.fetissov.org/public/nycbug/nycbug-09-05-12.mp3 Sevan

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