Cool stuff for Academic Developers

Open Source Hardware - or - OpenSPARC as a platform for instruction

Monday Nov 10, 2008

Most everyone has heard of Sun's support for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) by now. But can you open source hardware? Well, that's exactly what Sun has done with OpenSPARC. Perhaps a bit more background is in order.

Through the OpenSPARC Community, Sun has made the hardware source code of the UltraSPARC T1 & T2 processors available under an Open Source license. The code along with the development tools which are available through the OpenSPARC community, provide the essential components to develop a new chip. Of course, what makes this all really interesting is that OpenSPARC represents the bleeding edge of multi-core, multi-threaded chip architecture or CMT as we say at Sun.

So what does all this have to do with college professors? Well...alot. To understand why, it's appropriate to reflect on the quote by that famous professor of computer architecture who said "I skate to where the puck is going to be,..."

We all know that this quote is really by Wayne Gretzky, but here is why the quote applies to chip architecture. If you are a professor, you want your courses to be relevant today, while you are teaching them and still be relevant for your students once they graduate. Multi-core, mult-threaded architectures are not only the current state-of-the-art, but the future as well.

Professors have their choice of chip platforms to include in their curricula. But, why not select the platform packing the most cores and threads and one that integrates all the key functions of a server on a single chip? If you combine the benefits of an open source platform with the technical benefits, OpenSPARC is a compelling choice. So to once again paraphrase the Great One, professors selecting OpenSPARC as an instructional platform are "skating to where the puck is going to be"

In Europe, universities and professors can now benefit from a new collaborative relationship between Sun and Europractice, a European Union-backed non-profit microelectronics design stimulation project. This new collaboration is designed to cultivate Europe's future engineering talent and provide researchers, professors and students with an end-to-end solution to help create next-generation multithreaded microprocessors. Sun and Europractice will work together to promote curriculum adoption beginning with a series of OpenSPARC technology workshops this autumn. Professors attending the workshops will then be able to incorporate OpenSPARC in their courses.

Another helpful resource are the OpenSPARC Slidecasts consisting of 12 modules which participants through the process of developing their own OpenSPARC designs. The twelve chapters cover the different aspects of OpenSPARC and together are equivalent to a 2 day technical OpenSPARC workshop.

Also take advantage of the free download of the newly published OpenSPARC Internals, edited by David Weaver. Register and download a free PDF copy.

And, here's something for all you SW developers. We need software optimized to leverage the benefits of multi-core, multi-threaded architectures. A great resource is the White Paper: Multithreaded Application Acceleration with Chip Multithreading (CMT).