Durgam Vahia's Weblog: OpenSPARC - Open-source Multi-core, Multi-thread Processor Design

It always feels great to see work like this .. 

http://www.srikiran.net/blog/2009/03/30/opensparc-t2-synthesis-part-1/

We are delighted to announce the availability of OpenSPARC T1 version 1.7. With this release, community can port a truly multi-core multi-thread 64bit commercial processor design on FPGAs. Additionally, we now support two different FPGA boards of different capacities. First one is OpenSPARC Evaluation Board that hosts single Xilinx XC5VLX110T device, and the second one, called BEE3,  is from a start-up company called BEEcube. BEE3 has four larger size Xilinx XC5VLX155T FPGA devices with support for up-to 64GB memory (More about BEEcube in the next blog entry).

Some of the notable features of this release are:

• Dual core T1 design with each SPARC core residing on one OpenSPARC FPGA evaluation board. Each core could be single thread or four-threaded (allows up-to 8 threads)
  
• Ability to boot Ubuntu Linux as well as OpenSolaris on single core and dual-core reference designs
  
• Support for the BEE3 board that allows up-to 4 SPARC cores to be mapped on a single board (allows up-to 16 hardware threads)

Finally, this release also supports Xilinx ISE and EDK version 10.1.

We hope this release will further enable community to build truly multi-core, multi-thread hardware platform in the configurable environment.

What's common among these three things - Europe, Textbook and the Training Material .... Read on ..

We just announced whole bunch of new activities around OpenSPARC. We hope this will further reduce barriers to adoption for the state-of-the-art Chip Multi-threading (CMT) technology for the educators and entrepreneurs throughout the world.

Sun Microsystems and Europractice , a European Union-backed non-profit stimulation project, based in England, have signed a three-year collaboration agreement to promote OpenSPARC as a reference design among 650 universities and research institutions across 38 countries in the European region. You can read the full Europractice press release here

Sun has also just released a new book: OpenSPARC Internals, a reference resource for OpenSPARC designers, developers and programmers. We belive this will be a tremendously useful resource as a single source of information, not just as a design detail document but also as a cookbook that helps with setting up simulation and emulation environments, making changes to the OpenSPARC code, fitting the OpenSPARC RTL onto an FPGA, and more. The book was written by the OpenSPARC team of engineers, and edited by David Weaver. What's more? PDF of the book is available for free for download.

As a bonus, we have also added 12 modules (over 5 hours) of OpenSPARC online training material. This material, created by engineers who architected, designed and developed UltraSPARC T1 and T2, will provide OpenSPARC community a quick way to get started with the design and available resources.

Very good collection of Gujarati poetry. Maintained by a friend - Pancham.

http://www.commsp.ee.ic.ac.uk/~pancham/mystuff.html

http://spancham.wordpress.com