Planet LUG-Jaipur

January 15, 2012

Shakthi Kannan (mbuf)

25th International Conference on VLSI Design

I attended the 25th International Conference on VLSI Design and 11th International Conference on Embedded Systems between January 7-11, 2012 at the Hyderabad International Convention Centre, Hyderabad, India. The first two days consisted of tutorial sessions, and the next three days had the conference presentations. There were also exhibit stalls from different companies.

25th VLSID 2012

On the first day I attended the tutorial session on SystemC AMS extensions by Markus Damm, Sumit Adhikari, and François Pecheux. Chitlesh Goorah had earlier tried to get SystemC into Fedora and Fedora Electronic Lab, but, due to licensing issues it could not be included. SystemC-AMS is now released under Apache license. Open SystemC Initiative and Accellera Unite have now integrated to become Accellera Systems Initiative. We hope to work with them to get their sources under a single free/open source software license. François Pecheux is from Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6, Pierre & Marie Curie University (UPMC), Paris, France, and we already ship their free/open source EDA tools in Fedora.

On day two, I attended the tutorial session by Sridhar Arvind on 3D-ICE, a free/open source interlayer cooling emulator from Embedded System Laboratory, Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. I have already been working with Sridhar, Prof. David Atienza and Alessandro Vincenzi on testing 3D-ICE on Fedora. I had built and tested the dependency SuperLU library and the 3D-ICE package before the tutorial session. Their software has already been downloaded by over 70 research labs around the world. I will push our tested changes to them. On the later half of the day, I attended a session on verification constraint complexity. Teal is a useful verification utility and connection library that has support for constraints and parameter control. The authors of the tool had agreed to release it as free/open source software, and we also ship it in Fedora.

On the following three days of the conference, I attended various paper presentations from different tracks from reconfigurable architectures to methods in AMS optimization. I met Prof. Susmita Sur-Kolay from the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India where they run Fedora in their labs. They also wished to use the 3D-ICE tool and GPU tools in their labs. I also visited the exhibit stalls meeting different people from the industry and academia. There are quite a few interesting free/open source tools that users can benefit from, and we will work in making them available in Fedora. In 2013, the conference will be held in Pune. Thanks to Red Hat for sponsoring my travel and participation at the conference.

January 15, 2012 01:20 PM

January 10, 2012

Rag Sagar (ragsagar)

ragsagar

Last month itself there were talks that the final year BE/BTech results will be available by January first or second week. When it became January there were posts in various unofficial blogs that the results will be coming out by January 4th. Blogs said that on worst case it will be postponed to January 5th and they even stated the time University will be updating it in the database. But days passed, nothing happened. And this cycle is still going on. I was thinking how much traffic will they be getting during these days. I just wanted to know how much clicks they will be getting for using those particular keywords in their posts. Even if they are providing fake news they will be getting lots of hits. Even i am checking those blogs twice daily. They are exploiting students’ eagerness to know about their examination results. Let me check the increase in number of traffic to this blog after posting this. I will come up with an update to this post if there is considerable increase in number of clicks.
BTW, now one of the University site says that the results are expected to come out by January 12th.


by Rag Sagar.V രാഗ് സാഗര്‍.വി at January 10, 2012 05:12 PM

December 28, 2011

Shakthi Kannan (mbuf)

Tux workshop, MindSpark 2011, CoEP, Pune, Maharashtra, India

I had conducted an introductory session on Fedora as part of the Tux workshop, MindSpark 2011 at College of Engineering, Pune, Maharashtra, India on Tuesday, December 27, 2011.

Tux workshop

There were hundred participants distributed between the morning and repeat sessions in the afternoon. I explained about hardware architecture, system boot sequence, and discussed basic installation concepts to the participants. I then gave a demo of installing Fedora using Virtual Machine Manager. I showed them the plethora of F/OSS software that they can use, and also discussed about Fedora sub-projects, and basic project/communication guidelines. I have given them F16 ISO DVD images.

Thanks to Sanket Mehta for working with me for a month in organizing this workshop. Few photos taken at the event are available in my /gallery.

December 28, 2011 12:05 PM