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Superoptimization and supercomputing talks, Wed 26th November at The RSA.
by Andrew Back 11 Nov '14

11 Nov '14

Hello, There are no hardware talks this month, but the BCS OSSG is hosting two talks on open source software with a "super" theme — supercomputing and superoptimization. Details and a link to registration are below. Also note that this month the venue is the Royal Society of Arts on The Strand, and not the BCS! Cheers, Andrew //// Location: The Prince Philip room Royal Society of Arts 8 John Adam Street London WC2N 6EZ Date: Wednesday 26 November Time: 6:00pm for 6:30pm start Price: Free for BCS members and non-members Booking link: https://events.bcs.org/book/1320/ (Please remember to book your place.) N.B. Note the change of venue, due to a double booking at the BCS. The RSA is just the other side of the strand from the BCS. map: RSA, 8+John+Adam+St,+London+WC2N, This month we have two talks on a "super" theme. Talk 1: Superoptimization: How fast can your code go. Speaker: James Pallister, University of Bristol Modern compiler optimization can take almost any code and produce a reasonably efficient binary at the end. However compiler "optimization" doesn't make your code "optimal", just better. In contrast, superoptimization can produce perfect code - the fastest, the smallest or the most energy efficient code. The technique, first introduced in the late 80s found in some cases it could do 25% better than the best assembly programmer, and 40% better than the best compiler at the time. Free software has always played a central role in superoptimization research, with the GNU Superoptimizer being one of the very first tools constructed. However there is a downside. Superoptimization today is incredibly demanding of compute time, so currently it is limited to short instruction sequences. At present it is most valuable in optimizing code hotspots and key library routines, and can also be a valuable aid to the compiler writer for peephole optimization. Recent research has developed new techniques that can make superoptimization more applicable to general code. In this talk I will introduce superoptimization and give some examples of the weird and wonderfully short sequences of code it produces. I will introduce the GNU superoptimizer and show how it is used, including some of the recent improvements I have contributed. The final part of my talk will look at the latest research including machine learning and constraint solving, and show how in future superoptimizers may be able to optimize much larger programs. Talk 2: Open-source Software in UK Scientific HPC Speakers: Neil Morgan and Phil Ridley, Hartree Centre, STFC Daresbury There are hundreds of scientific applications, libraries and tools that are used within the UK's academic HPC community and a large number of these are open-source. To demonstrate this usage and the benefits of open-source to this community, a short review of some of these will be given. Applications will be included which are used for performing atomistic and molecular simulations, computational fluid dynamics, and statistics for bioinformatics. All of these are able to utilise the capabilities of high end computing architectures with thousands of cores to facilitate new science. Furthermore, since efficient object code is of greatest importance in HPC, the use of open-source in compilers, tools and libraries will also be described. N.B. Note the change of venue to the RSA. Booking link: https://events.bcs.org/book/1320/ (Please remember to book your place.)

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Real vs fake FTDI FT232RL chip
by Sevan / Venture37 23 Oct '14

23 Oct '14

http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/FTDI-FT232RL-real-vs-fake-supereal The rest of the blog is worth a look, lots of die shots e.g. Soviet Z80 http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/t34vm1-z80-angstrem-mme Sevan

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NON-profit
by Mark.itto 16 Oct '14

16 Oct '14

Hi, I Studied technical High school in Granada Nicaragua, the digital divide is still today with all the internet very big because of the purchasing power hence access to technology even cheap stuff we could consider cheap and accessible like Arduino and RPi. I want to donate some Arduino to my old school I looking for help on things like boards, accessories (sensors, motors...), and internet access(monthly cost). Does anyone have any experience running things like this? I'd like some advise on how to approach and find potential helpers. Im thinking 50 boards 1000£ in accessories Some way of sorting the internet maybe ask ISP for help? I'm also considering crowd funding and things like that. I live in London, so at the moment I'm looking for interested and trust-able people in the country itself. Looking for some expertise. xD Kind regards. MarcoP.

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PCBmodE version 3.0 released!
by Saar Drimer 06 Oct '14

06 Oct '14

Hello OSHUG friends. I've just released a major version of PCBmodE (open source PCB design software): https://boldport.squarespace.com/blog/2014/10/3/pcbmode-version-30-released This time it has documentation! (Well, a start) http://pcbmode.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html and a apex domain http://pcbmode.com Any feedback would be much appreciated! I'd also like to take this opportunity to update you on Boldport. We're now based on London and looking for business, so please get in touch if you've got any ideas ;) I'll be at the next OSHUG event, so I'm looking forward to seeing many of you in person again. Have a great productive week! cheers, saar.

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OSHUG #36 — Chips Pt. 2, Thursday 23rd October.
by Andrew Back 05 Oct '14

05 Oct '14

Hello, Registration is now open for the meeting October meeting. Details below. Regards, Andrew // Event #36 — Chips Pt.2 (Chip Design for Teenagers, Cocotb, lowRISC) 23rd October 2014, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA. Registration: http://oshug.org/event/36 Back in April 2011 we had our first meeting on the theme of open source chip design, and then around one year later we took a closer look at the OpenRISC Reference Platform System-on-Chip. The thirty-sixth meeting will feature talks on chip design for teenagers, an open source verification framework, and a fully open source system-on-chip that will be manufactured in volume. — Silicon Chip Design for Teenagers These days we expect school students to learn to write code, and teachers are turning to tools like Scratch (for primary education) and Python (for secondary education). But why stick to software languages. Why not teach coding in Verilog and get children to design silicon chips. Earlier this year Dan Gorringe attended Chip Hack II in Cambridge. Inspired by this he spent two weeks work experience at Embecosm in August 2014 modifying the Chip Hack materials for use by Year 9-11 students. His resulting application note, "Silicon Chip Design for Teenagers", is to be published very shortly by Embecosm. In this talk, Dan will share his experience of learning silicon chip design, using Verilog for his first serious attempt at coding and encountering Mentor Graphics EDA tools for the first time. Dan Gorringe has just started year 11 and faces the horrors of GCSE exams in 8 months time, so silicon chip design is just light relief. He has aspirations to a career in computing. — Cocotb, an Open Source Verification Framework Verifying hardware designs has always been a significant challenge but very few open-source tools have emerged to support this effort. The recent advances in verification to facilitate complex designs often depend on specialist knowledge and expensive software tools. In this talk we will look at Cocotb, an open-source verification framework, and explore whether Python is a viable language for verification. Chris Higgs has over a decade of experience working with FPGAs in various industries. His software background has shaped his approach to RTL design and verification and he now spends his time trying to bridge the divide between hardware and software development. — lowRISC — a Fully Open Source RISC-V System-on-Chip The lowRISC project has been formed to produce a System-on-Chip which will be open source right down to the HDL, implementing the open RISC-V instruction set architecture. Volume manufacture of silicon manufacture is planned, along with creating and distributing low-cost development boards. This talk will describe the aims of the lowRISC project, summarise its current status, describe some of the features that are being implemented, and give details on how you can get involved. Alex Bradbury is a researcher at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory where he works on compilation techniques for a novel many-core architecture. He writes LLVM Weekly, is co-author of Learning Python with Raspberry Pi, and has been a contributor to the Raspberry Pi project since the first alpha hardware was available. Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the first talk will start at 18:30 prompt. //

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Call for Makers - Makers Area 2014 at Sandown Park
by marc barto 29 Sep '14

29 Sep '14

Hi all I thought this might interest some of you in the OSHUG community as we had lots of electronics exhibits last year, from Arduino/Rpis based projects to custom boards. Happy to discuss details if interested, all info below. cheers Marc @marc_in_london <https://twitter.com/marc_in_london> ------ *Call for Makers - Makers Area 2014 at Sandown Park* The Makers Area is back at the Model Engineer Exhibition. Our first edition was a a great success with over 2,000 people attending the 3 day long event to discover amazing DIY creations by the 30 makers taking part. If you want to see what happened last year, have a peek at our photo gallery! <https://www.flickr.com/groups/2401543@N25/> *About me* I run various Makers and open hardware groups in London (London Arduino, Not Just Arduino) and also co-organise the Mini Maker Faire in London. *Makers Area at MEX* This event involves hundreds of stands with the whole community of modellers, tinkerers, hobbyists (there is a locomotive coming from Australia...) and some of the best engineers in the UK. We will have a large dedicated area for 3D Scanning/Printing/Craft/Coding/Electronics (and more). *When / where?* This will take place on *12-**14 December in Esher, Surrey (25min outside London) *here is the link: http://www.modelengineershow.co.uk/makersshow If you want to see what happened last year, have a peek at our photo gallery! <https://www.flickr.com/groups/2401543@N25/> Any question get in touch!

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Milkymyst
by Sevan / Venture37 29 Sep '14

29 Sep '14

Hi, Some of you may remember Yann presenting the milkymyst project a couple of years back at OSHUG, Yann has just been awarded a NetBSD commit bit for the work he has done on porting NetBSD to that architecture :) Sevan

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Free MIPS-based boards.
by Andrew Back 04 Sep '14

04 Sep '14

Free Pi-esque MIPS-based boards available to those with $IDEAS: http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr-developers/new-mips-creator-ci20-development… Cheers, Andrew

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NetBSD on OpenRISC 1000
by Sevan / Venture37 03 Sep '14

03 Sep '14

http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/bx/blosxom.cgi/nb_20140903_2307.html Sevan / Venture37

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Parallax Propeller 1 now open source
by Sevan / Venture37 09 Aug '14

09 Aug '14

Parallax just announced they've open sourced a multicore micro controller and posted the verilog files which you can synthesise on a DE0-nano. https://twitter.com/ParallaxInc/status/497852329216180224 Sevan

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