[Ukfreebsd] Fwd: [oshug] OSHUG 55 — FPGA projects past, planned and possible, Thursday 16th February.

Sevan Janiyan venture37 at geeklan.co.uk
Sat Feb 11 20:57:52 GMT 2017


Hello,
To relate it back to *BSD, I'll be giving a short talk on using pkgsrc
which by the time of this event should have grown support for generating
packages for the IceStorm toolchain family.


Sevan
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andrew Back <andrew at abopen.com>
Date: 19 January 2017 at 09:20
Subject: [oshug] OSHUG 55 — FPGA projects past, planned and possible,
Thursday 16th February.
To: "oshug at oshug.org" <oshug at oshug.org>


Hello,

Registration is now open for the February meeting, details of which can
be found below.

We also still have space for 1 or 2 more short talks of 10-15 minutes,
so if you have an idea for a talk, get in touch!

Cheers,

Andrew

//

Event #55 — FPGA projects past, planned and possible

On the 16 February 2017, 18:00 - 20:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The
Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA.

  Registration: http://oshug.org/event/55

The fifty-fifth meeting will feature a series of shorter talks that
explore past, planned and possible projects which use FPGAs.

— FPGA Projects - What would I build and why would I want to

PLAs have been interesting ever since the 70s when digital logic often
became complex, consuming unnecessary space and power. Back then the
cost of PLA deployment was high and it has continued to be high until
recently. Now that we have powerful, low cost development platforms and
relatively cheap FPGAs the cost equation has shifted radically.

* Paul Tanner is a consultant, developer and maker in wood, metal,
plastic, electronics and software. His day job is IT-based business
improvement for SMEs. By night he turns energy nut, creating tools to
optimise energy use. Paul graduated in electronics and was responsible
for hardware and software product development and customer services in
several product and service start-ups, switching to consulting in 2000.

— Using FPGAs to solve realtime problems

Microcontrollers a great platform to solve basic control problems in
electronics, with simple motor drivers and sensors readily avaiable and
easy to integrate. However, when the motor control becomes more complex
with BLDC and FOC things get much more tricky. When you have to use
multiple BLDC motors and more complex sensors with image processing the
poor microcontroller quickly becomes to swamped to provide control in
realtime. This is where adding FPGA technology makes a great deal of
sense particularly in mutli-discipline projects like robotics where many
sensors, motors and image processing will need to be managed and
controlled concurrently. A robotics platform must therefore contain both
concurrent hardware resources, algorithmic control through soft or hard
cores along with communication protocols.

* Alan Wood has been working with parallel distributed programming for
several decades. His recent work includes smart grids, 3D printers,
robotics, automation and biotec diagnostics. His current research is
focused on machine learning, inference and image processing for embedded
applications using FPGA and multi-cores. He is a long term advocate and
moderator (aka Folknology) for xCORE and other opensource communities,
as well as a founder of Surrey and Hampshire Makerspace and myStorm FPGA
development boards.

— FPGAs in the Cloud?

It is no secret that FPGA based computing machines are great at dealing
with certain types of workloads that conventional CPU based machines can
not efficiently handle. These machines, alongside their GPU and even
custom ASIC based brethren, have been filling up racks in large data
centres all over the globe helping speed up systems that have components
of machine learning, complex analytics and even video processing.

This short talk will have a look at the state of FPGAs in the datacenter
and discuss the recent developments around the availability of FPGA
equipped computing nodes in commodity cloud providers.

* Omer Kilic is an Embedded Systems Engineer who enjoys working with
small connected computers of all shapes and sizes. He works at the
various intersections of hardware and software engineering practices,
product development and manufacturing.

— Chip Hack 2017 & EDSAC Challenge

This talk will introduce and issue a call for participation for two
events that are being hosted as part of the Wuthering Bytes technology
festival, that will take place in Hebden Bridge in September, in the
week following Open Source Hardware Camp 2017.

Chip Hack is a two day hands-on workshop that provides a gentle
introduction to programming FPGAs and is aimed at novices with no prior
experience of Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) or FPGAs. This will
be followed immediately by a challenge event, during which a small team
of experts will work to extend a basic functional FPGA model of EDSAC —
the pioneering computer designed and constructed at Cambridge
University, and which was operational by 1949.

* Dr Jeremy Bennett is founder and Chief Executive of Embecosm, a
consultancy implementing open source compilers and chip simulators for
major corporations around the world. He is a author of the standard
textbook "Introduction to Compiling Techniques" (McGraw-Hill 1990, 1995,
2003). Contact him at: jeremy.bennett at embecosm.com.

Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.

— Deploying your FPGA toolchain consistently regardless of your
development environment

With an open source tool chain for an open hardware fpga, we're free to
work in the environment of our choice. What may differ between platforms
is how we put the components together, from requiring software
dependences to administrative commands needed to be executed in order to
build to software successfully.

pkgsrc is a cross platform packaging system which allows you to deploy
open source software consistently, regardless of the environment it is
operating on. This means should you desire to install the icestorm tool
chain, the steps required to build or install packages is the same
whether you're running a flavour of Linux, Mac OS or Windows.

This lightning talk will introduce pkgsrc and how you can get started
quickly with icestorm and other tools to help with your hardware project.

* Sevan Janiyan is founder of Venture 37, which provides system
administration & consultancy services. As a fan of operating systems and
computers with different CPU architectures, in his spare time he
maintains builds of open source software on a variety of systems
featuring PowerPC, SPARC and armv7l CPUs. He hopes to own a NeXTcube &
OMRON LUNA-88K2 one day.

— Multicore Made Simple - Conducting a Chorus of Cores on an FPGA

FPGA technology makes it simple to build a multicore CPU, by
instantiating multiple copies of a soft processor design on a single
chip. The challenge is to connect and coordinate the cores into a
resource which is useful for application programming. While traditional
multicore processors include shared memory, shared buses and/or general
communications networks, all of these are costly in hardware resources
and complexity, and subtle details of synchronization and cache
coherency can make programming difficult and risky. Building our own
system on an FPGA, we can choose a minimalist “shared nothing”
architecture, with only local memories and simple synchronous point to
point communications links in a topology tailored to the application. As
an example of this approach, I’ll demonstrate a 40 voice (plus
conductor) polyphonic digital audio synthesizer, running on an array of
41 Nios2 cores on an Altera Cyclone II.

* Dr Richard Miller has had a long career in the borderlands between
hardware and software, in academia and industry and now as an
independent consultant. Particular interests have been operating systems
portability (starting in 1977 with the world’s first UNIX port, from
PDP/11 to Interdata 7/32 at the University of Wollongong; and most
recently porting the Plan 9 OS to the Raspberry Pi); programming
language implementations in constrained environments (e.g. a LOGO
interpreter on a 48KB Apple II; and a JavaCard JVM and runtime library
on a smartcard with a 8KB of RAM and 1MB of flash); parallel computing
infrastructure (on hardware ranging from Transputers to the Cray T3D);
and embedded systems firmware (e.g. a complete Bluetooth stack for a
range of prototype phones and tablets). Current work in progress
includes building a communications network on an FPGA, for a
microcluster of Raspberry Pi Zeroes.

//

--
Andrew Back
http://abopen.com

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