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.  These meetings provide an opportunity to share the latest ideas around open source in the RISC-V ecosystem, combined with plenty of time for networking. Please discuss, give feedback and suggest future topics on the London Open Source Meetup group event page.

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. Bandić, @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. Bandić 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

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.