[MAGEEC] Fwd: Energy-efficient Computing developer room.

Jeremy Bennett jeremy.bennett at embecosm.com
Thu Nov 14 14:33:11 GMT 2013


Just a reminder that this is the original proposal for a Dev Room that
was accepted by FOSDEM.


J

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Energy-efficient Computing developer room.
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 12:21:23 +0100
From: Andrew Back <andrew at abopen.com>
To: devrooms at fosdem.org
CC: Jeremy Bennett <jeremy.bennett at embecosm.com>

To whom it may concern:

We would like to apply to host a developer room at FOSDEM for Sunday
2nd February 2014, on the  theme of energy-efficient computing. There
are also plans to submit an application for a main track talk on this
topic for the Saturday.

Dr Jeremy Bennett and myself will be coordinating this room. Dr
Bennett is CEO of a compiler and hardware modelling consultancy [1]
that works exclusively with open source software, and with a
particular focus on energy-optimized compilation and leading key
research in this area, the outputs of which are being published as
open source. Dr Bennett has been a GCC contributor for the past 14
years, and is author of the popular textbook, "Introduction to
Compiling Techniques" (McGraw-Hill 1990, 1995, 2003) and holds an MA
and PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University.

The draft schedule for the proposed developer room is as follows:

* Who ate my battery? Why energy-efficiency matters (Dr Jeremy
Bennett, Embecosm)

This introductory talk will set the context for the day. It will take
a look at how energy efficiency is *the* major challenge for systems
developers, and will then provide an overview of a number of open
source projects that demonstrate how the energy-efficiency of the
entire system can be significantly improved.

* The Physics of energy usage (Dr Simon Hollis, University of Bristol)

This talk will take the form of a tutorial with Q&A throughout,
exploring the various factors in hardware, software and system design
that affect energy consumption. Participants are invited to discuss
their particular projects, to help address specific areas where energy
may be an issue.

* Energy measurement hardware (James Pallister, University of Bristol)

James Pallister is the designer of the open source PowerSense shield,
capable of accurately measuring the power consumption of a device up
to 6 million times per second. He'll present the design of PowerSense
and show how it can be used.

* Workshop: Measuring application energy consumption with instrumented
hardware (all)

Bring along your applications and have their energy consumption
measured on a pre-instrumented Arduino, Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone.
Alternatively, bring along your own design on a breadboard and we'll
hook up a PowerSense shield to measure the energy usage.

* MAchine Guided Energy-Efficient Compilation (Simon Cook, Embecosm)

MAGEEC, a collaboration between the open source software house,
Embecosm, and Bristol University's microcomputer group, aims to use
machine learning to improve the energy efficiency of compiled code.
This entirely open source project is funded by the UK government
through the Technology Strategy Board, and aims to provide working
systems based on LLVM and GCC by the end of 2014.

* An introduction to ENTRA (Dr Kerstin Eder)

An introduction to the Whole-Systems Energy Transparency (ENTRA)
project and the latest research in static analysis of code for energy
consumption, how we link this into the LLVM compiler and what the
state of the project is, together with what we hope to achieve. Open
source tools covered will include one which maps ISA to LLVM.

* The Energy-Aware COmputing Framework (Glen Anderson & Hayden Field,
University of Bristol)

This talk will cover a new open source framework which is about to be
published that  provides energy transparency to enable energy-aware
software development.

* Energy-efficiency, open source and the UK Technology Strategy Board
(speaker TBC)

In this short talk, we will hear how the UK's innovation agency, the
Technology Strategy Board (TSB), promotes energy efficient computing
and embraces open source projects. The engagement of government as
both funder, and through Knowledge Transfer Networks communications
provider, is key to fast development in this field.

Biographies:

- Dr Simon Hollis is a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University
of Bristol, with particular interests in microelectronics, VLSI
design, and security architectures. Under the supervision of Dr Simon
Moore, he undertook a PhD entitled Pulse-based, On-chip Interconnect
at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He also holds an
MA (Hons) in Computer Science from the same institution.

- James Pallister is a graduate of the University of Bristol, where he
achieved joint First Class Honours in Computer Science and
Electronics, and he is presently studying for a PhD in low-power
multi-core system design. As part of current research activities James
is combining high resolution energy measurement hardware with
superoptimizer search, to find sequences of instructions which use as
little energy as possible.

- Simon Cook has a background in low-power processors, with a
particular focus on the energy constraints of code running in embedded
environments. He also provides support for our work on low level
binutils for both GNU and LLVM toolchains. Mr Cook is a graduate of
the University of Bristol, where he achieved joint First Class Honours
in Computer Science and Electronics.

- Dr Kerstin Eder's research activities are focused on specification,
verification and analysis techniques which allow engineers to design a
system and to verify/explore its behaviour in terms of functional
correctness, safety, performance, power consumption and energy
efficiency. Her work includes both formal methods and traditional
simulation-based approaches. She has a strong background in
computational logic, especially formal verification, declarative
programming languages and their implementation, abstract machines,
compilation techniques and meta programming.

- Glen Anderson is an undergraduate in the Department of Computer
Science at the Univeristy of Bristol. He is interested in the design
of programming languagues and toolchains that facilitate the
development of secure, reliable and verifiable software, particularly
operating systems.

- Hayden Field is an undergraduate in the Department of Computer
Science at the Univeristy of Bristol.

- Andrew Back runs an open source and technical communities
consultancy. He previously acted as BT’s Open Source Strategist,
establishing company-wide open source policy and process and
representing them at a number of bodies including The Linux Foundation
and ATIS.

Please don't hesitate to get in touch should you require any further
information.

Yours Sincerely,

Andrew Back

[1] http://www.embecosm.com

-- 
Andrew Back
Principal, AB Open Ltd
http://abopen.com

-- 
Tel:     +44 (1590) 610184
Cell:    +44 (7970) 676050
SkypeId: jeremybennett
Email:   jeremy.bennett at embecosm.com
Web:     www.embecosm.com
Twitter: @embecosm






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