[MAGEEC] FOSDEM dev room.

[Jeremy Bennett]

On 12/09/13 15:58, Andrew Back wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> We're planning to submit our application for a developer room at
> FOSDEM later today and so I'd appreciate feedback on the outline
> below, along with any suggestions for additional topics we could
> cover, projects we could invite, or workshops we could host.

Hi Andrew,

Thanks - my input in the running text below.

General points
- bios of participants (pull from websites)
- comment that others are expected to participate, but details not yet 
agreed.
- workshop should be in the middle.
- note that we are also proposing a main track talk, and ideally that 
would be on Saturday, with the dev room on Sunday.

> Note that these are just working titles and projects should have open
> source software and/or hardware outputs.
>
> 1. Energy-efficiency: challenges and opportunities (Jeremy)

Better title "Who ate my battery? Why energy efficiency matters"

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

> 2. The Physics of energy usage (Simon H)
>
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.

> <description?>
>
> 3. Energy measurement hardware (James)
>
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.

---

I suggest workshop goes here (comments below)

---
> 4. MAchine Guided Energy-Efficient Compilation (Simon C, or multi-handed?)
>
> An introduction to the MAGEEC project, from data gathering, through
> machine learning and to compiler integration.

MAGEEC, a collaboration between the open source software house, 
Embecosm, and Bristol University's microcomputer gorup, 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 its 
Technology Strategy Board, and aims to provide working systems based on 
LLVM and GCC by the end of 2014.

In this talk, Simon Cook, lead engineer on the project, will introduce 
the system, so that participants can use it with their own code. He'll 
be joined by colleagues specializing in the machine learning side, who 
will show how this strategy can lead to better code.

This will be an interactive session, and the hope is that other 
participants will be able to contribute more benchmark test cases to 
improve the machine learning algorithms.
>
> 5. An intro to ENTRA (Kerstin)
>
> Presentation on the latest research in static analysis of code for
> energy consumption, how we link this into llvm and what the state of
> the project is, together with what we hope to achieve. An overview of
> some of the tools produced and invitation to provide input to their
> development.

Need to bring out open source aspects. I suggest tie in to the 
importance of ordinary users being able to see how much energy their 
software is using.

> 6. EACOF (Kerstin?)

Glen Anderson, Hayden Field (Bristol University)

As and undergraduate project, Glen Anderson and Hayden Field have 
defined an open framework which eables the development of applications 
that provide information about past and predicted energy usage directly 
to the user. The two APIs replace platform specific instrumentation, one 
providing energy information available to other software in a portable 
way, the second providing access to energy information, without the need 
for bespoke instrumentation on each platform.

In this talk Glen and Hayden will present their work

> 7. Energy measurement workshop
>
> Bring along your applications and have the energy consumption measure
> on a pre-instrumented Arduino, Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone.

...Or bring along your own design on a breadboard and we'll hook up a 
power sense shield to measure the energy usage.

As noted, this should be in the middle.

8. Energy efficiency, open source and the UK Technology Strategy Board 
(speaker name to be confirmed).

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

9. A SystemC model of multicore OpenRISC with power instrumentation

This talk is subject to confirmation...

HTH,


Jeremy

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