Here comes the sun: and I say it's all right

This is my first entry, and what better way to start, than with a great event? A three-day workshop ocurred last week here at São Paulo, having openSPARC specification and FPGA implementation as main subjects. The workshop happened from 24th through 26th March and was hosted by the Grupo de Sistemas Pervasivos e de Alto Desempenho (Pervasive systems and high performance group - PAD) of the Laboratory of Integrated Systems (LSI) of the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo (EPUSP). This was the first of many events related to the openSPARC center of excellence program at USP.

The introduction had the special participation of Carlos Thomaz and Eduardo Lima from Sun and Prof. Sergio Kofuji, coordinator of the PAD group. In the first day morning, the presentations introduced the principles and concepts of the openSPARC community and Sun’s Throughput Initiative. It showed the history, aspects and design decisions of the architecture. In the afternoon T1 and T2 particular issues were defined. The next day was very interesting, with nice presentations and a practical laboratory over the FPGA modeling theme. In the last day, we talked mainly about multicore specific aspects. You can see the full schedule here.

Prof. Sergio Kofuji gave me the opportunity to perform a presentation about the CMT and CoolThreads technology in the first day. You can download my slides here. The speakers were Sergio Kofuji, Jussara Kofuji, Fernando Muzzi, Edson Horta, German Santos, Stelvio Barbosan, Antonio Amorim, Eduardo Lima, Carlos Thomaz and Marcelo Arbore.

As you can see, this was a great meeting that gave outstanding information about the technologies that is leading the next generation of hardware multicores. Polytechnic School have a great role in history of brazilian computers hardware development, proudly having produced the first Brazilian computer inside its campus, called Patinho Feio, in 1972. SUN is a company that was born at the Stanford University. There is no doubt that these two giants in hardware development working together can result nothing less than amazing projects.