Monthly Archives: January 2013

Turing100 Lecture: Life and work of John Backus (Fortran|BNF) – 2 Feb

The Turing100 Lecture Series come back with the 6th session. This time, there are two Technical talks, centered around the life and works of 1977 Turing Award recipient, Dr. John Backup.

In addition to several other contributions, Dr Backus is well-known for his pioneering work on Fortran as well as the inventor of the Backus-Naur Form (BNF) which is widely used as the notation for formal syntax.

On Saturday, 2nd Feb, Abhijit Vichare, will talk about the life and work of John Backus.

This will be followed by a session on “Early History of Fortran: The Making of a Wonder” by Prof. Uday Khedkar, Department of CSE, IIT-Bombay.

The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here

About the Turing Awards

The Turing awards, named after Alan Turing, given every year, are the highest achievement that a computer scientist can earn. And the contributions of each Turing award winner are then, arguably, the most important topics in computer science.

About Turing 100 @ Persistent Lecture Series

This year, the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series. Each lecture will be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and will cover the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series will feature talks on Ted Codd (Relational Databases), Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn (Internet), Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (Unix), Jim Gray, Barbara Liskov, and others. Full schedule is here

This is a lecture series that any one in the field of computer science must attend. These lectures will cover the fundamentals of computer science, and all of them are very relevant today.

Fees and Registration

This is a free event. Anyone can attend.

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 2nd February. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here

Call for Speakers: GNUnify 2013 – 3-day open-source technologies conference

The call for speakers for GNUnify 2013, one of India’s biggest open source conferences, which runs for 3 days in February (15, 16, 17 Feb) in SICSR, Pune, is now open.

If you have done any work with any open source technology, whether it is in the area of System Admin, Networking, Security, Web Technologies, Mobile Technologies, Cloud Computing, Scientific Computing, System Programming, or any General Topics or Trends in FOSS, please submit a proposal for a talk.

Lots of people from all over India, and also some from abroad, come for this conference. This is your chance to connect with people passionate about technologies, and enthusiastic students.

You can put in a proposal for a techie talk (short), a workshop (long – and more geared towards beginners), or a BOF (Birds of a Feather – where you just decide the topic and drive the discussion, and all the people interested in that topic collect together and discuss).

You don’t need to be an expert in the topic you propose for a talk. You just need to have done work in that area, and have actual hands on experience – that is good enough. At this point, you just need to submit a one paragraph abstract – so you have no excuse for not submitting a talk.

To submit a proposal go to the GNUnify website, create an account either using OpenID or username/password, and once you log into your account you should see a “Register a Talk/Workshop” button on the right side of the screen.

Event Report: VLSI Design Conference Pune 2013

(This is an event report of the VLSI Design Conference that was held in Pune in Jan 2013, by Shakthi Kannan. It originally appeared on his blog, and is reproduced here with permission for the benefit of PuneTech readers.)

The 26th International Conference on VLSI Design 2013 and the 12th International Conference on Embedded Systems was held at the Hyatt Regency, Pune, India between January 5-10, 2013. The first two days were tutorial sessions, while the main conference began on Monday, January 7, 2013.

26th VLSID 2013

Day 1: Tutorial

On the first day, I attended the tutorial on “Concept to Product – Design, Verification & Test: A Tutorial” by Prof. Kewal Saluja, and Prof. Virendra Singh. Prof. Saluja started the tutorial with an introduction and history of VLSI. An overview of the VLSI realization process was given with an emphasis on synthesis. The theme of the conference was “green” technology, and hence the concepts of low power design were introduced. The challenges of multi-core and high performance design including cache coherence were elaborated. Prof. Singh explained the verification methodologies with an example of implementing a DVD player. Simulation and formal verification techniques were compared, with an overview on model checking. Prof. Saluja explained the basics of VLSI testing, differences between verification and testing, and the various testing techniques used. The challenges in VLSI testing were also discussed.

Day 2: Tutorial

On the second day, I attended the tutorial on “Formal Techniques for Hardware/Software Co-Verification” by Prof. Daniel Kroening, and Prof. Mandayam Srinivas. Prof. Kroening began the tutorial with the motivation for formal methods. Examples on SAT solvers, boundary model checking for hardware, and bounded program analysis for C programs were explained. Satisfiability modulo theories for bit-vectors, arrays and functions were illustrated with numerous examples. In the afternoon, Prof. Srinivas demoed formal verification for both Verilog and C. He shared the results of verification done for both a DSP and a microprocessor. The CProver tool has been released under a CMBC license. After discussion with Fedora Legal, and Prof. Kroening, it has been updated to a BSD license for inclusion in Fedora. The presentation slides used in the tutorial are available.

Day 3: Main conference

The first day of the main conference began with the keynote by Mr. Abhi Talwalker, CEO of LSI, on “Intelligent Silicon in the Data-centric Era”. He addressed the challenges in bridging the data deluge gap, latency issues in data centers, and energy efficient buildings. The second keynote of the day was given by Dr. Ruchir Puri, IBM Fellow, on “Opportunities and Challenges for High Performance Microprocessor Designs and Design Automation”. Dr. Ruchir spoke about the various IBM multi-core processors, and the challenges facing multi-core designs – software parallelism, socket bandwidth, power, and technology complexity. He also said that more EDA innovation needs to come at the system level.

Dias

After the keynote, I attended the “C1. Embedded Architecture” track sessions. Liang Tang presented his paper on “Processor for Reconfigurable Baseband Modulation Mapping”. Dr. Swarnalatha Radhakrishnan then presented her paper on “A Study on Instruction-set Selection Using Multi-application Based Application Specific Instruction-Set Processors”. She explained about ASIPs (Application Specific Instruction Set Processor), and shared test results on choosing specific instruction sets based on the application domain. The final paper for the session was presented by Prof. Niraj K. Jha on “Localized Heating for Building Energy Efficiency”. He and his team at Princeton have used ultrasonic sensors to implement localized heating. A similar approach is planned for lighting as well.

Post-lunch, I attended the sessions for the track “B2. Test Cost Reduction and Safety”. The honourable chief minister of Maharashtra, Shri. Prithviraj Chavan, arrived in the afternoon to formally inaugurate the conference. He is an engineer who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and said that he was committed to put Pune on the semiconductor map. The afternoon keynote was given by Mr. Kishore Manghnani from Marvell, on “Semiconductors in Smart Energy Products”. He primarily discussed about LEDs, and their applications. This was followed by a panel discussion on “Low power design”. There was an emphasis to create system level, software architecture techniques to increase leverage in low power design. For the last track of the day, I attended the sessions on “C3. Design and Synthesis of Reversible Logic”. The Keccak sponge function family has been chosen to become the SHA-3 standard.

Day 4: Main conference

The second day of the main conference began with a recorded keynote by Dr. Paramesh Gopi, AppliedMicro, on “Cloud computing needs at less power and low cost” followed by a talk by Mr. Amal Bommireddy, AppliedMicro, on “Challenges of First pass Silicon”. Mr. Bommireddy discussed the factors affecting first pass success – RTL verification, IP verification, physical design, routing strategies, package design, and validation board design. The second keynote of the day was by Dr. Louis Scheffer from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, on “Deciphering the brain, cousin to the chip”. It was a brilliant talk on applying chip debugging techniques to inspect and analyse how the brain works.

After the keynote, I visited the exhibition hall where companies had their products displayed in their respective stalls. AppliedMicro had a demo of their X-gene ARM64 platform running Ubuntu. They did mention to me that Fedora runs on their platform. Marvell had demonstrated their embedded and control solutions running on Fedora. ARM had their mbed.org and embeddedacademic.com kits on display for students. Post-lunch, was an excellent keynote by Dr. Vivek Singh, Intel Fellow, titled “Duniyaa Maange Moore!”. He started with what people need – access, connectivity, education, and healthcare, and went to discuss the next in line for Intel’s manufacturing process. The 14nm technology is scheduled to be operational by end of 2013, while 10nm is planned for 2015. They have also started work on 7nm manufacturing processes. This was followed by a panel discussion on “Expectations of Manufacturing Sector from Semiconductor and Embedded System Companies” where the need to bridge the knowledge gap between mechanical and VLSI/embedded engineers was emphasized.

Day 5: Main conference

The final day of the main conference began with the keynote by Dr. Vijaykrishnan Narayanan on “Embedded Vision Systems”, where he showed the current research in intelligent cameras, augmented reality, and interactive systems. I attended the sessions for the track “C7. Advances in Functional Verification”, and “C8. Logic Synthesis and Design”. Post-lunch, Dr. Ken Chang gave his keynote on “Advancing High Performance System-on-Package via Heterogeneous 3-D Integration”. He said that Intel’s 22nm Ivy Bridge which uses FinFETs took nearly 15 years to productize, but look promising for the future. Co(CoS) Chip on Chip on Substrate, and (CoW)oS Chip on Wafer on Substrate technologies were illustrated. Many hardware design houses use 15 FPGAs on a board for testing. The Xilinx Virtex-7HT FPGA has analog, memory, and ARM microprocessor integrated on a single chip giving a throughput of 2.8 Terabits/second. He also mentioned that Known Good Die (KGD) methodologies are still emerging in the market. For the last track of the conference, I attended the sessions on “C9. Advances in Circuit Simulation, Analysis and Design”.

Shakthi Kannan

Thanks to Red Hat for sponsoring me to attend the conference.

About the Author – Shakthi Kannan

Shakthi Kannan is a Senior Software Engineer with Red Hat in Pune, and is also a very active member of the open source community. For more details about him, see his Linkedin Profile, or his blog.

CSI-Pune/POCC Internship Mela – get an internship job with Pune Startups

Pune Open Coffee Club and The Computer Society of India, Pune are jointly organizing an internship and job fair targeting MCx, BCx, BE and MBA students. The idea is to get together the startups and other companies of Pune with the students who are looking for internships and jobs.

This event is free to everyone. Interested students should see instructions for students below. Companies who wish to present at this event and offer internships/jobs should see instructions for companies below.

Note: Companies register here, and students register here

For Students

This is a job fair with a difference. Here you will not meet the same old large corporations, but will meet up with Pune’s rocking startups!

What’s so great about that?

You don’t find so many startups in one place, at one time, all accessible to interact with you!

Why work with startups?

Startups are cool. Startups are where the action is. The experience that you would get in a startup in a few months, would be better than what you would get from large corporations in a few years. In startups, you get an exposure to the various moving parts of a company – coding, testing, admin, HR, marketing… you name it! More than all of this, you get to work directly with founders of the company, who will one day make it very big (like Google, Twitter?).

What do startups want from me?

Life at startups can be very exciting – but you need to be prepared to give more than 100%. Many startups work on cutting edge technologies, and there is going to be a huge learning curve for you, to be able for you to meaningfully contribute to the company. So, it requires dedication, patience and a positive attitude.

I’m game. Am I eligible? Plus, when and where is the fair?

If you are pursuing your B.E, M.C.A, M.C.M, B.C.A, M.C.S, B.C.S or M.B.A, then you are eligible. Great, right? The fair is on 19th January from 10am to 5pm. The venue is Millennium National School, 18 Hill Side, Karvenagar, Pune – 411052. The directions are at: http://myshala.com/team/contact-us/

This must be costing a bomb?!

NO! This event is totally FREE of cost. However, prior registration is mandatory (and you have to arrange for your own food!)

How do I register for the event?

Register here: http://headtracker.in/JobFairForm.html

After you register, you can follow the updates for the event on punestartups.org

What do I need to do or bring along?

Get your resume along (d-uh!). Here is the format for the event:

  • It will be a full day event – 10am to 5pm.
  • The event will start with a talk from successful startup(s), talking about why startups are cool, and why it is worth your while to join one.
  • After that, the startups who are looking to hire will do some canvassing of why they are cool, what they are working on, which technology they use, and whom are they looking to hire etc. The time duration for this should be
    around 5 minutes per startup.
  • 10 chits will be given to each attending student, where (s)he has to choose the startups that they want to meet. All you have to do is put in a startup name of your choice to visit on each one.
  • There will be a lunch break (not going to be provided), and then startups will occupy their positions in the classrooms, and you will visit the booths as per their preference. 3 minutes will be given to have a one-on-one interaction with members of the startup.
  • The startup will collect the chit from you, and possibly, your resume. That will be a sign that the startup is interested in getting you to work for them! Startups would like to hire you from the very next day. Be aware of that!
  • Done. Go back with a great feeling of having interacted with Pune’s rocking startup community!

Whom do I contact if I have any questions?

Join the POCC mailing list on punestartups@googlegroups.com, and ask away!

For Companies

As a startup, it is not easy for you to go to campuses and approach students directly. That is why, this is a great opportunity – because of the number of startups presenting at this event, it will attract a large number of students. This is your chance to meet and impress a large crowd with minimal effort.

Only startups are invited to this event, so you’re not competing with the large companies here.

What do I get?

You get to meet a bunch of enthusiastic students, who are ready to work as interns at your great company, or would love to work with you too!

Which students are we inviting?

We are inviting MCx, BCx, BE and MBA Marketing students. Especially interesting are the students who are required to do a 6-month internship as a part of their degree. They work with you full-time, in your office for 6 months.

How many?

Approximately 300 students are expected.

I’m game. When and where is the fair?

The fair is on 19th January from 10am to 5pm. The venue is Millennium National School, 18 Hill Side, Karvenagar, Pune – 411052. The directions are at: http://myshala.com/team/contact-us/

This must be costing a bomb?!

NO! This event is totally free of cost. However, prior registration is mandatory.

Register here

Life and Times of Alan Turing by Mathai Joseph

InnoVidya and IUCAA invite everyone to a lecture on the life and time of Alan Turing, widely considered the father of computer science, by Dr. Mathai Joseph, who can be considered one of the senior most computer scientists in Pune.

Alan Turing, was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, giving a formalisation of the concepts of “algorithm” and “computation” with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. The most important award in computer science, the Turing Award, is named after Alan Turing.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth, and hence we are celebrating it with a talk on his life and his contributions to computer science. This talk is targeted towards anyone interested in computers – no special knowledge of computer science will be assumed.

About the Speaker – Dr. Mathai Joseph

Dr. Mathai Joseph did his PhD at the University of Cambridge, UK, and joined the Tata Institute of F undamental Research in 1968. He was appointed to a Chair in Computer Science at the University of Warwick in 1985. At various times, he has been a visiting professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, Eindhoven University of Technology, University of Warwick and University of York.

He joined Tata Consultancy Services in 1997 as an Executive Vice President and was the Executive Director of the Tata Research Development and Design Centre until his retirement in 2007.

He was Chairman of the Board of the International Institute for Software Technology from 2 005-2007 . He has written several books and numerous papers.

Mathai Joseph was elected as a Member-at-Large of the ACM Council in 2008. He is the President of ACM India and has been a member of the ACM India Council since it was formed in 2009.

About InnoVidya

InnoVidya is a group of educators and industry professionals who want to reach out to students, teachers, trainers and working professionals and catalyze significant improvements in their learning ecosystems. In addition to the InnoVidya website and the InnoVidya mailing list, we also hold public lectures on the 4th Saturday of every month. Lectures usually involve talks by senior educators, industry visionaries, or social and/or for-profit entrepreneurs working in the space of higher education.

We are currently based in Pune, but we expect that this initiative will expand all over India.

If you’re interested in the state of education in India, please subscribe to email/RSS updates at: http://innovidya.org.

Event Details

The event is on Saturday, January 19 , 2013, at 11am, at the Chandrashekhar Auditorium, IUCAA, at University of Pune campus.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. There is no need to register.

LiveBlog: Maharashtra CM Prithviraj Chavan’s address at VLSI Conf Pune

(This is a live-blog of the keynote address of Prithviraj Chavan, CM of Maharashtra, at the 26th International Conference on VLSI Design that is currently going on at the Hyatt, in Pune. For those who didn’t know, Prithviraj Chavan is an electrical engineer from BITS Pilani and Univ of California, Berkeley.)

The semiconductor industry in India started first in Bangalore, and then in Delhi/NCR. Pune is late to this game. But we have the potential to better than Delhi/NCR, and even Bangalore.

These are the things that need to happen for Pune to become a semiconductor hub:

  • Government should create facilities where the expensive EDA tools are setup, and various companies from industry can sign up for use of the tools.
  • Work on increasing the quality of manpower in and around Pune. We have to potential of having one of the highest ratios of high quality – low cost manpower. We need to work with universities and other educational institutions in this area.
  • We should continue trying to attract fabs to come and setup in Pune

We are a large customer of mobiles and other electronic devices. As we continue to grow at 8-9%, we will become an increasingly attractive market. And there will also be many opportunities to create specialized devices for local markets. This can drive innovation and incubation.

The CM said that he is completely committed to working with us (i.e. the tech community in Pune) to ensure that Pune gets put on the semiconductor map. He announced that any company investing in semiconductors in Maharashtra will get a rebate on their VAT until they recoup their investment. In addition, he hopes that the government will be able to help jumpstart this industry by these means:

  • Government will set up the physical infrastructure
  • Government will put up the initial funding for the expensive tools
  • Government will set up training facilities to get people started on this
  • We should together set up server farms, and other infrastructure needed to get started

Maharashtra is larger than most countries in the world, as large as Mexico, and larger than any European country. It attracts 33% of the FDI that came into the country. Maharashtra is well positioned to become the chip destination of India.

#VLSI-Conf-Pune 2013 Event Report: Intelligent Silicon in the Data-Centric Era

(This is a live-blog of the keynote address given by Abhi Talwalkar at the 26th International Conference on VLSI Design being held in Pune. Abhi is the President and CEO of LSI Corporation. (LSI has had a large development center in Pune for the last 4 years.)

(Note: since this is a live-blog, it is only a partial and unorganized report, and might contain errors and omissions.)

The innovation happening in the world since the first transistor was developed has been unparalleled in history. This has led to various changes, including a flat world where anyone can innovate from anywhere in the world, there is lots and lots of collaboration, and where for the first time, information and data are the most important currency.

As a result, we are now seeing a deluge of data. The reasons are:

  • Everybody is on social networks and creating/sharing data
  • Everyone has personal devices (8.5 billion devices sold per year, 40% of them are smart devices), and again people are living a lot of their lives through these devices
  • Other devices are generating data automatically, and will continue to do so

The technology challenges resulting from this data deluge are in the areas of devices, the data centers and the network. These are the challenges in these areas:

  • Bring your own device. Previously, companies insisted on employees using company approved devices (e.g. Blackberry only, and no iPhones). But more and more employees want to use their own devices, and company IT departments are forced to deal with them. The variety of devices that need to be supported is a proble. And the devices need to be always on and always connected – and so do the enterprise backend apps that need to support these devices. The enterprise IT apps need to support mobile devices seamlessly, and in general there is a consumerization of enterprise IT – driving a newfound focus on improved end-user experiences.
  • Green Impact of Devices: All these devices generate e-waste, emissions and use up energy
  • Network bottlenecks: the wireless spectrum which these devices use is getting congested. The backhaul network connections are also facing a capacity crunch. And security in all these areas is an area of increasing concern.
  • Green Impact of DataCenters: Data centers have increased energy consumption by 3x. Telecom in India consumes 3 billion litres of diesel. This is second only to railways, and is a major contributor to the carbon emissions.

Since most of the above seem like software challenges, what does Silicon (Hardware/VLSI/Embedded systems) have to do with them? The answer is that silicon allows you do more with less, and is a key catalyst for innovation. There is much more power in CPUs today than we need – and we need to figure out how to use it. There needs to be more intelligent hardware which knows how to protect the data, where to move it, etc.

What are the specific problems that can/should be solved in silicon?

  • Hardware Accelerators: A full suite of silicon based accelerators can be deployed in the network and the data center.
  • Improve latency and capacity: utilization levels continue to remain low in data-centers, and can be improved significantly
  • Intelligent caching: For example, appropriate use of flash memory between magnetic storage and memory can get much better performance without a significant increase in infrastructure.
  • Use sensors and gather data to make the silicon more intelligent and take better decisions. For example, many companies would leave lights on all night but now more and more are deploying sensors which will turn off the lights when not required. This concept can be extended to many other areas.

Turing100 Lecture: Life and work of Jim Gray – By Anand Deshpande – 5 Jan

The Turing100 Lecture Series come back with the 6th session. This time, there are two Technical talks, centered around the life and works of 1998 Turing Award recipient, Dr. Jim Gray.

Jim Gray made seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and implementions of real systems at Tandem, IBM, and Microsoft. Among his best known achievements are

  • granular database locking
  • two-tier transaction commit semantics
  • the “five-minute rule” for allocating storage
  • the data cube operator for data warehousing applications
  • describing the requirements for reliable transaction processing (memorably called the ACID test) and implemented them in software.

On Saturday, 5th January, Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent Systems, will talk about the life and work of Dr. Jim Gray, the recipient of the 1998 Turing Award. This talk is a part of the Turing Awards monthly lecture series that happens at Persistent’s Dewang Mehta Auditorium.

This will be followed by a session on “Software Faults, Failures and Their Mitigation – contributions of Dr. Jim Gray to the area of Fault Tolerant Systems” by Prof. Kishore Trivedi, Duke University, USa.

The event is free for everyone to attend. Register here

About the Turing Awards

The Turing awards, named after Alan Turing, given every year, are the highest achievement that a computer scientist can earn. And the contributions of each Turing award winner are then, arguably, the most important topics in computer science.

About Turing 100 @ Persistent Lecture Series

This year, the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series. Each lecture will be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and will cover the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series will feature talks on Ted Codd (Relational Databases), Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn (Internet), Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (Unix), Jim Gray, Barbara Liskov, and others. Full schedule is here

This is a lecture series that any one in the field of computer science must attend. These lectures will cover the fundamentals of computer science, and all of them are very relevant today.

Fees and Registration

This is a free event. Anyone can attend.

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 5th January. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here