From venture37 at geeklan.co.uk Mon Oct 14 12:08:56 2019 From: venture37 at geeklan.co.uk (Sevan Janiyan) Date: Mon, 14 Oct 2019 12:08:56 +0100 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] Lightning talks and AGM 17/10/2019 Message-ID: <99e12cdb-19a7-5143-dc80-52141e16f118@geeklan.co.uk> Hi, This months OSHUG/OSSG meetup is on Thursday, kick off at 18:30. Please note BCS London has moved, the new address is BCS London 25 Copthall Ave London EC2R 7BP United Kingdom Registration link: https://ossg171019.eventbrite.co.uk/ Programme: *AGM Everyone is welcome to attend, but only BCS members may vote. We will have the brief reports on the past year?s activities and then elect a new committee. *Embedded Facial Recognition on Edge TPU* Pietra F T Madio Google recently released a new development board for edge computation on embedded devices. For my project I implemented a facial recognition system on their device using Tensorflow. In this talk I?m presenting some of the challenges I faced, the limitations of the board and how we were able to overcome them. Pietra is a college student at Brockenhurst College and an AI Research Engineer for Embecosm. *The Open Source Satellite Programme* Paul Madle Over the last 25 years, the UK has brought positive disruptions to the space industry. The University of Surrey innovated small spacecraft: leveraging Commercial-Off-The-Shelf components that could compete with larger more traditionally designed spacecraft. In the last 7 years, Scottish CubeSats (very small satellites) have grown from academic projects into commercially viable products performing earth observation and other applications. Both of these innovations have brought down costs and made space more accessible to greater numbers of people. KIPSE Space Systems aspires to be a catalyst for the next step-change to the industry by collaboratively designing a new, capable spacecraft platform that is open source, all design being freely accessible through the internet. Paul Madle has 20 years? experience as a systems/software engineer within the Aerospace, Finance & Web sectors. His code runs on the most critical on board systems for some of the UK?s most significant spacecraft projects. He is very keen to share his knowledge with the next generation of engineers and runs code clubs that have successfully transitioned young people with few qualifications into capable software engineers who now work within the industry. *It?s Open Source, not gratis binaries* Sevan Janiyan A commentary on a prevailing attitude towards Open Source software. Sevan is the founder of Venture 37, which offers consultancy around the fundemental building blocks of IT systems such as DNS, email, HTTP, firewalls or routing running on UNIX & alike systems. *Intel 8080 microprocessor on an FPGA* Maxim Blinov The Intel 8080 microprocessor was one of the first widely available general-purpose microprocessors. Given its historic significance and relatively straightforward ISA, I implemented a binary compatible softcore variant using VHDL, targeting the Artix7 100T FPGA. Accompanying the softcore CPU is a PS2 keyboard controller, VGA text buffer, and 7-segment display driver. These components are accessible from the 8080 through memory mapping, which is realized by a central memory access controller. Hence, software can read scan codes from the keyboard controller, and writes text to the VGA terminal, which is enough for a simplistic but nonetheless curious software platform. The hardware description source can be found at https://github.com/mablinov/intel-8080. Maxim is currently working at Embecosm, helping to develop and support open-source GCC-based toolchains. His last major work was to benchmark and debug the experimental GCC support for the draft RISC-V bitmanip ISA extension, using both software simulation and verilated IP cores. Maxim is also interested in FPGA hardware design, and embedded software development. *Making with BlackEdge* Al Wood, @folknology Using the BlackEdge standard to build the new BlackIceMx, eating our own dog food. Al is an engineer of opensource hardware & software, practitioner of robotics, electronics & 3D Printers and tutor of ML, FPGA & Verilog. Bit wrangler in C, Erlang & Python. *Title TBA* Andy Bennett, @databasescaling Andy Bennett is founder of Register Dynamics and inhabits the void between hardware, software and users. He serves on the BCS Open Source SG committee as one of our event coordinators. From venture37 at geeklan.co.uk Fri Oct 18 17:13:07 2019 From: venture37 at geeklan.co.uk (Sevan Janiyan) Date: Fri, 18 Oct 2019 17:13:07 +0100 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] London Open Source Meetup for RISC-V 21/10/19 Message-ID: <49f4932c-6fbf-c643-9f60-720f5b2debb4@geeklan.co.uk> This is our quarterly meetup for the London open source community, focusing on RISC-V, hosted by the BCS Open Source Specialist Group and the UK Open Source Hardware User Group. Registration link: https://ossg211019.eventbrite.co.uk/ Note. This meeting is at the new BCS London offices, 25 Copthall Ave, EC2R 7BP. At this evening meeting we have three talks on the CHIPS alliance, a comparative analysis of the RISC-V ecosystem and a look at RISC-V in education. The talks will be live streamed and available on afterwards on the BCS Open Source Specialist Group YouTube channel. Tea/coffee will be served from 6:00pm, with talks starting at 6:30pm. Each talk will last 20-30 minutes and include plenty of time for questions, after which there will be opportunity to network both in the BCS and later at the Globe pub round the corner. We shall be livestreaming and recording the talks for later posting on YouTube via GoToWebinar. Please register at: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2236026621826907405 After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. *Chips Alliance Project* Dr Zvonimir Z. Bandi?, @zbandic We have recently launched a CHIPS Alliance project: CHIPS (Common Hardware for Interfaces, Processors and Systems) Alliance harnesses the energy of open source collaboration to accelerate hardware development. The organization was created to host and curate high-quality, open source hardware design relevant to the design of silicon devices. By creating a neutral and collaborative environment, CHIPS Alliance intends to share resources to lower the cost of development and accelerate the creation of more efficient and innovative chip designs ? covering the span from small IoT devices to large datacenter silicon solutions. As an independent entity, companies and individuals can work together and contribute resources to help make open source chips, complex IP blocks and system-on-a-chip (SoC) design more accessible to the market. We will describe our initial projects, which are SweRV core ? high performance, 9-stage, dual issue, 32 bit superscalar RISC-V core, associated instruction set simulator, Universal Verification Methodology (UVM)-Based Stream Generator Environment for RISC-V Cores, that provides configurable, highly stressful instruction sequences that can verify architectural and micro-architectural corner-cases of designs, OmniXtend cache-coherence over ethernet interconnect protocol, FuseSOC package manager, Verilator RTL simulator, cocotb design verification and several others. Zvonimir Z. Bandi? is the Research Staff Member and Senior Director of Next Generation Platform Technologies Department in a Western Digital Corporation in San Jose, California. He received his BS in electrical engineering in 1994 from the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and his MS (1995) and PhD (1999) in applied physics from Caltech, Pasadena, in the field of novel electronic devices based on wide bandgap semiconductors. He is currently focusing on emerging Non-Volatile Memories (PCM, ReRAM, MRAM) applications for data center distributed computing, including RISC-V based CPU technologies , in-memory compute, RDMA networking, and machine learning hardware acceleration. He has been awarded over 50 patents in the fields of solid state electronics, solid state disk controller technology, security architecture and storage systems and has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers. Zvonimir is Chairman of CHIPS Alliance, Chair of OpenCAPI org, and Board of Directors member of RISC-V standards organization. *Open Source Hardware meets Open Source Software* George Grey, @gcgrey The RISC-V architecture spans 32 bit micro-controllers to 128 bit advanced multi-core SoCs. The free and open ISA encourages and accelerates innovation and differentiation in hardware design. However, a large part of the cost of ISA support is the delivery and evolution of a software ecosystem. Software fragmentation has historically been a significant industry challenge. This is particularly true in the IoT, embedded and Edge device markets, where there is an unlimited range of different hardware configurations and use cases. This talk will discuss different paths to development of the RISC-V software ecosystem in a world where billions of devices are now being connected, requiring universal standards for IoT to Cloud end to end applications, including security and over the air updates for every device. George is CEO of Foundries.io. He was previously CEO of Linaro Ltd, leading open source software collaboration in the Arm ecosystem for the last 8 years. Prior to joining Linaro, George led software and hardware technology companies for over 25 years, gaining wide ranging expertise in business strategy, product development, sales and marketing. He has built a reputation for leading and growing technology companies, and brings extensive experience in creating innovative products and solutions for global markets to Foundries.io. George holds a degree in Electrical Sciences from Cambridge University and currently resides in Cambridge, UK. *Ripes: Teaching computer architecture through visualization* Morten Borup Petersen The presentation will provide an overview of typical topics covered in an introductory computer architecture course to motivate the use of visual tools in teaching. We will then take a look at Ripes, an application for visually simulating a 5-stage pipeline implementing the RISC-V instruction set. Besides simulation, the main purpose of Ripes is to visualize the implications of control- and data hazards on the processor microarchitecture. Find the source code for Ripes at: https://github.com/mortbopet/Ripes Morten is at the EPFL, Switzerland, specializing in computer engineering and embedded systems. He is the author of Ripes, an open-source application for teaching computer architecture through visualization, using the RISC-V instruction set. He has previously interned at Arm Cambridge as well as published research on computer architecture at the NorCAS and ARCS conferences. From alnsn at yandex.ru Mon Oct 21 21:45:30 2019 From: alnsn at yandex.ru (Alexander Nasonov) Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 21:45:30 +0100 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] Octorber's London *BSD meetup 29/10/19 Message-ID: <20191021204530.GA5768@neva> Hello, This month's meeting will be on Tuesday the 29th, 18:30 onwards at The Hand & Shears. The Hand & Shears 1 Middle Street Cloth Fair London EC1A 7JA Tel: 020 7600 0257 http://www.thehandandshears.co.uk -- Alex From venture37 at geeklan.co.uk Tue Oct 29 16:25:16 2019 From: venture37 at geeklan.co.uk (Sevan Janiyan) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 16:25:16 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] OSHUG #78 - An Evening on Modern Programming Languages Message-ID: During this evening, held jointly with OSHUG, we look at the latest in open source programming languages. Three talks from three highly respected speakers Note. We are in the new BCS London offices at 25 Copthall Ave EC2R 7BP. Register at https://ossg211119.eventbrite.co.uk/ Tea/coffee will be served from 6:00pm, with the talks from 6:30pm. Each talk will last around 30 to 45 minutes including any questions. We shall be livestreaming and recording the talks for later posting on YouTube via GoToWebinar. Please register at: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/2652791007348976652 An introduction to Perl6 Simon Proctor An introduction to the newest version of Perl with an emphasis on some neat features. With 17 years as a professional web developer (in a range of languages) and over 30 years of doing it for fun Simon Proctor has just about started to understand what he?s doing. He?s on occasion been known to take things seriously. Julia ? A fresh approach to numerical computing Avik Sengupta In this talk, Avik will demonstrate how Julia combines dynamic, high level source with a high performance runtime code. He will show what makes Julia unique among programming languages, and how it enables high quality numeric computing libraries. He will survey the machine learning / deep learning ecosystem in Julia, and talk about how that can be extended to new kinds of modelling using differentiable programming. The talk will begin as an introduction to the language, and finish by showing how it opens up new paradigms of computing. Julia is the fastest high performance open source computing language for data, analytics, algorithmic trading, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and many other fields. Julia solves the two language problem by combining the ease of use of Python and R with the speed of C++. Avik Sengupta is the head of product development and software engineering at Julia Computing, contributor to open source Julia and maintainer of several Julia packages. Avik is the author of Julia High Performance, co-founder of two artificial intelligence start-ups in the financial services sector and creator of large complex trading systems for the world?s leading investment banks. Prior to Julia Computing, Avik was co-founder and CTO at AlgoCircle and at Itellix, director at Lab49 and head of algorithmic solutions at Decimal Point Analytics. Avik earned his MS in Computational Finance at Carnegie Mellon and MBA Finance at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. Evolving Languages: 5 Steps to Go Charles Forsyth Go is the latest of a sequence of closely related concurrent programming languages: Squeak, Newsqueak, Alef, Limbo and Go. Each one strictly followed its predecessor, they occupy a similar space (CSP-inspired concurrent languages), and all but Squeak have a vaguely similar syntax, perhaps suggesting gradual refinement and incremental evolution. I take a closer look, revealing their significant differences, especially in in type systems and run-time environments, reflecting the effect of different design choices to satisfy the requirements of a larger, surrounding system. Dr Charles Forsyth is a founder and Technical Director of Vita Nuova, which specialises in systems software and distributed systems. He is interested in compilers, operating systems, networking (protocols and services), security, and distributed systems and algorithms. He specialises in the design and implementation of systems software, from low-level drivers through compilers to whole operating systems. He has published papers on operating systems, Ada compilation, worst-case execution analysers for safety-critical applications, ?resources as files?, and the development of computational grids. From venture37 at geeklan.co.uk Tue Oct 29 17:49:03 2019 From: venture37 at geeklan.co.uk (Sevan Janiyan) Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 17:49:03 +0000 Subject: [Ukfreebsd] OSHUG #78 - An Evening on Modern Programming Languages In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <7d408e16-6e5d-01bd-d545-cd7c14e22dc2@geeklan.co.uk> On 29/10/2019 16:25, Sevan Janiyan wrote: > Note. We are in the new BCS London offices at 25 Copthall Ave EC2R 7BP. > > Register at https://ossg211119.eventbrite.co.uk/ Apologies, forgot to mention the date in the post, it's on the 21st of November. Sevan