Hi, everyone, I'm sure you've noticed that the OGP has been rather dead for a good long time. I'm hoping to find opportunity to change that in the not too distant future, and I'm looking for some suggestions and discussion on this. Let's keep in mind that although the OGP is ostensibly about graphics, many of us are interested in open hardware in general, and I don't consider any open hardware project to be off topic on OGML.
Having completed the requirements for my Ph.D., I am now, as Jeremy Clarkson would say, "a Doctor of Engineering." Additionally, I am pleased to accept the position of Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Binghamton University in New York. There, I will be teaching Computer Architecture and doing research in that area, with a heavy emphasis on energy efficiency. You can get my CV at https://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti/timothy-miller-cv-online2.pdf to see what I've done so far, and Binghamton hired me to continue doing that. I will also be at least indirectly associated with E3S (http://www2.binghamton.edu/e3s/), collaborating with many engineers of similar and different disciplines, making data centers more efficient, and I will focus on the microprocessor. Now, I see shader-based GPUs as just another kind of many-core processor, and with scientific computing taking heavy advantage of the streaming and parallel nature of GPU cores even in the data center, I see lots of opportunity to explore interesting GPU architectures and GPU energy efficiency. The OGP has specifications for a shader engine, and it would be interesting to see what we can do to the design to optimize it in different ways. With research funding, we can even turn FPGA-based prototypes into real standard cell ASICs. I like to generalize, though, and blur the boundaries between different types of specialized microprocessors. AMD is already doing this with their Fusion products; in a future generation, GPU shaders will have virtual memory addressing, completely eliminating the distinction between "graphics memory" and "main memory." When doing research, we can be fanciful and not assume that the main CPU is always x86, allowing us to be a bit more creative. As a research professor, my main job is to produce publishable, fundable scientific results. (Fortunately for me, being a better engineer than scientist, most of the innovation in my area is actually engineering.) I have lots of ideas I plan to put into grant proposals, but few of them are things that I think would align well with the goals of the OGP. So what I'm interested in discussing is research opportunities that WOULD align with the OGP. That would be doubly awesome as far as I'm concerned, being able to do interesting research, publishing in traditional channels, as well as contribute to the FOSS community. Projects often work out best when there are many more groups that benefit. It would be awesome to develop a feedback loop between computer engineering research and open hardware. Additionally, I'm interested in just general, open discussion on these topics. Thanks. -- Timothy Normand Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Open Graphics Project _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
