On Sun, Jan 06, 2013 at 12:10:19AM -0500, Timothy Normand Miller wrote: > > Case in point: Who's paying Timothy's bills, and why has he been so > > motivated to keep pushing OpenShader along? > > > > > I was motivated to start the OGP in 2004 because at the time, there wasn't > any off-the-shelf graphics card that had FOSS driver support. ATI, for > instance, had just decided to stop publishing docs for the Radeon 9200 (or > some similar model at the time, I forget exactly which). I thought it > would be productive and fun to use my skills as a graphics chip designer to > solve this problem. > > I decided to change the direction of the project (the earlier approach had > only very limited success anyhow) in early 2012 because I discovered that > there were no particularly good GPU simulators and there was no > open-architecture GPU at all. It's completely different for CPUs, with > plenty of open-architecture designs and really good cycle-accurage and > energy-accurate simulators. To get tenure, I'm going to have do something > that makes a substantive impact on my field. Why not do it an area I'm > really passionate about? Why not leverage something already going on? Why > not have a positive impact on both the FOSS community and the academic > community at the same time, with the same project? Also, I think it would > be a lot of fun and a really compelling challenge solve this gaping problem. > > Also, I go to work every day to pay my bills. And I certainly don't think > OpenShader is going to change that (at least not for the better).
I can think of about 15 different reasons why open-architecture GPU simulators would be not only be a tenure-worthy project, but a great DOE Exascale computing sub-project. Everyone is on the GPU bandwagon for HPC it seems. Before you spend to much time writing generate statements, also take a look at http://milkymist.org/3/migen.html, and http://networkx.github.com/ (which it uses). It might be worth contacting some of the Networkx users for collaboration... see: http://networkx.github.com/documentation/latest/bibliography.html#ba02 I think you got lucky in that you're in a position to do interesting open hardware work that ALSO lines up well with some interesting research problems. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
