Tag Archives: hardware

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

Event Report, , ,

(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.

Profile: Renu Electronics & Ajay Bhagwat

Featured, Interview, , ,

(This article is a based on a broad and free-wheeling interview of Ajay Bhagwat, founder of Renu Electronics, by Navin Kabra and Amit Paranjape)

To a large extent, the computer technology in India is synonymous with software technology. So, when we found that Renu Electronics manufactures all its own hardware for all the products it sells, including LCD panels, and that this is all being done in a small building on Baner Road, we were shocked.

Renu Electronics, founded by Ajay Bhagwat, has generally maintained a low profile, but has a very interesting story to tell.

Early Years

Ajay has an interesting educational background. After his engineering at IIT-Bombay, he went to the US on an L&T scholarship, and did his Masters from the University of Iowa. Here, he excelled, finishing his Masters in 9 months, in the process getting some really interesting results. Specifically, he figured out an algorithm in control systems to determine whether a particular system’s transfer function could be identified adaptively or not. This result was useful enough that some senior professors from UIUC and industry folks from GM requested him to do some additional work on this algorithm to get some specific results they were interested in. For this additional work, which he did in a few months, he got an one more Masters degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne.

1990s – Starting Renu Electronics

Ajay came back to Pune in 88, and by 1992, had decided to start Renu Electronics, 100% export oriented unit selling HMIs (human machine interfaces; i.e. front end control panels for industrial control systems). The basic idea was to sell a common front end panel that could talk to many different backends and give the customer a common interface. The trick is to be able to talk all the different protocols of the different backend systems (which did not have standards or interoperability). This was done using a core firmware and then pluggable drivers for each backend – which also made it easy to add support for new backends. This was a big improvement in usability since having to teach floor technicians a different front end interface for each backend manufacturer was a major pain point for his customers.

At this time, the majority of the business came from white labeling this technology to established brands. Even GE approached them and started selling this technology under the GE brand. He was one of the few people in India at that time who was exporting technology to the US and Europe instead of importing it. When he was filling out a customs department form for this purpose, he got scolded by the customs officer for putting machinery in the outgoing column and money in the incoming column. The officer knew that things are supposed to be the other way around. It took a long time to convince him that the form was indeed correct.

Building Products

Renu’s flagship products are HMIs which allow industry floor operators to do configuration entry, monitoring of status, alarms in case of exceptional conditions, production of reports, and trends (graphs).

By 1995, Renu had decided that they would manufacture all their own hardware. By designing the entire system in-house they were able to achieve efficiencies that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. For example, they used the 8051 chip, and made maximal use of all the features of this chip, so that they were able to do alarm handling, interfaces, dual-port communications, using just the internal RAM of the 8051 chip – which is just 256 bytes. This gave them a huge cost advantage. At one time, they got threatened by a competitor from Europe that dumping (i.e. selling a product at a price less than it costs to manufacture) is illegal and they would take action. The competitor was very surprised to learn that Renu was actually making a 20% profit in spite of the ridiculously low price.

Renu have always been a product company. They have never done a custom product for anyone, and they’ve always owned their own IP.

Initially, they were only providing the front ends, but soon they wondered whether they they should make their own PLC. All the top PLC companies were Renu’s customers, and Renu did not want to upset the customers. But it turns out that customers actually encouraged Renu to enter this space. They were not worried about competition from Renu, but were happy that Renu would understand the market and domain even better and come up with even more innovative products that they could white label.

Renu was the first company in the world to put the PLC in the HMI itself. This works well for smaller systems. But it also led to too many different products and was messy in terms of sales and marketing – and was confusing to customers. So they designed a modular system which allows PLCs to be chained together to create simple or complex PLCs depending upon what exactly the customer needs. This makes it easier for the customer to create a customized system that exactly meets their needs, without having to go for a high-end, expensive system. The fact that the HMI can be with the PLC, and there is no new system and software to be integrated and learnt is another advantage. Now, finally, they have started a line of modular PLCs without the HMI, and most growth in recent years is coming from
the modular PLCs (with or without HMIs).

Focus on Quality

One of the biggest problems faced by Ajay was that neither he (nor most other people in India) understood how to create an industrially robust process. This resulted in manufacture of components that had latent problems – i.e. units that work perfectly fine, but stop working 6 months later. After they continued to have latent failures they learnt from their customers the various things they need to do to ensure long-term quality of their devices. They spent lots of time and money getting in-house quality control equipment and processes. This high level of quality control results in very reliable products – and this is now one of the USPs of Renu Electronics.

We took a tour of the premises and saw some of the advanced equipment used for testing at Renu. There’s one unit that allows devices to be tested at temperatures from -40 to +60 degrees Celsius. Another unit allows humidity testing up to 98% humidity. A voltage fluctuation/spike/pulse tester can produce a spike of 2Kv in 1 nanosecond. This is in addition to vibration testers, RF interference testers, and 60+ other tests. They have installed anti-static flooring on their manufacturing area. This is very expensive at Rs. 1600 per square foot, but has paid off handsomely, because their latent errors are now down to almost zero.

Staying Ahead of The Curve

Renu believes in implementing processes that they believe are the right thing to do in the long term irrespective of whether they are immediately required by customers or the law. For example, Renu is one of the few ISO-14001 compliant companies. Sometimes, this causes a problem for other companies, because Renu sets the standard and soon the others are expected to follow. On the other hand, sometimes this causes a problem for Renu.

For example, Renu was one of the first companies companies that was ROHS compliant. For this, they had to invest in ROHS compliant machinery and components – which cost significantly more. Further, their running costs went up, because the components they needed on a regular basis were more expensive. But, they’re still ROHS compliant because it is the right thing to do. This story has a happy ending (financially) though – from 1st January, 2012, this investment is going to pay off because there are two new Indian Government directives that will enforce control of hazardous materials, and Renu will already be compliant, whereas other companies would have to struggle.

KPIT Story

Ajay Bhagwat was also one of the promoters of KPIT, one of Pune’s most well known software services companies.

When Ajay was in IIT, he was very interested in music, and would organize and compete in music competitions (he was one of the people behind the creation of a program called Sur-Bahar, which still happens). Shirish Patwardhan was one of the people Ajay used to bump into at music competitions at IIT. Later, in the late 80s they met again in Pune, and started talking about starting a company for doing software products/services. So Ajay joined the software wing of Kirtane and Pandit (an accounting firm) and KPIT was born. Ajay helped set up the quality systems, and the embedded team for KPIT. Although Ajay has been out of day-to-day functioning of KPIT for a long time, he was a director of KPIT until recently.

Contributions to the tech/startup ecosystem in Pune

To those watching the startup ecosystem in Pune, it is clear that Ajay is also one of people helping TiE Pune’s revival this year. This year, TiE has had fortnightly ‘My Story’ sessions with very interesting and accomplished entrepreneurs, and monthly ‘Breakfast sessions’ with more free-wheeling discussions on issues of interest to entrepreneurs. This vitality of TiE in Pune is a very welcome addition to the startup ecosystem in Pune, and will certainly go a long way in cementing Pune’s position as one of the top destinations for doing startups in India.

As a charter member of TiE Pune, Ajay also sets aside 5 to 6 hours every week for one-on-one mentoring of entrepreneurs in Pune. This is a non-trivial time-commitment for any busy executive, but even that, says Ajay, is not enough. There is need for more mentorship of entrepreneurs in Pune. If you have a startup in Pune with actual revenues and enterprise sales, we would suggest talking to Ajay
for some guidance.

PuneChips Event: PCI Express Architecture and Applications for FPGAs – July 30

External Visitors, ,

PuneChips invites everybody to a talk on PCI Express Architecture and Applications for FPGAs by Kiran Puranik, a Principal Architect at Xilinx. This talk will be on 30 July, 10:30am, at the Venture Center, NCL Innovation Park, Pashan Road.

Abstract

Modern FPGA devices offer great advantages for designers of industrial imaging, networking, automation and control, data acquisition systems for test, industrial and medical applications. Apart from offering high performance programmable fabric, FPGAs offer a wide variety of IO standards to interface with networks, motors, sensors, transducers, offer built in high density data storage and the ability to interface to high speed external memory devices. But, most importantly FPGAs offer Gigabit serial connectivity via standards based protocols such as PCI ExpressTM. The ubiquitous nature of PCI Express technology enables development of FPGA based plug and play board and card products that interface with standard off-the-shelf embedded compute and communications platforms, running WindowsTM, Linux or other operating systems and custom device drivers. PCI Express 3.0 Architecture offers many reliability, availability and scalability features to address application needs, as well as advanced features such as relaxed transaction ordering, transaction processing hints, optimized buffer flush-fill, active power management to achieve the highest throughput performance possible within the platform’s power and thermal budgets.

About the speaker: Kiran Puranik

Kiran is a Principal Architect at Xilinx, Inc., responsible for serial connectivity protocol products such as PCI Express. He has spent the last 10 years at Xilinx engaged in architecture definition, design, development and verification of Intellectual Property blocks for several generations of FPGAs. Before Xilinx, Kiran held various engineering positions in the field of ASIC, ASSP design and ICCAD software development.

About PuneChips

PuneChips is a special interest group on semiconductor design and applications. It was formed to foster an environment for growth of companies in the semiconductor design and applications segment in the Pune area. Our goal is to build an ecosystem similar to PuneTech for companies in this field, where they can exchange information, consult with experts, and start & grow their businesses.

Please forward this information to anybody in Pune who is interested in renewable energy, solar technologies, semiconductors, chip design, VLSI design, chip testing, and embedded applications.

Fees and Registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. No registration required.

PuneChips Event: An Overview of RFID – 16 April

Events, , ,

PuneChips, the community for all those interested in semiconductor design and applications presents an Overview of RFID by Ashim Patil, on 16th April, at Venture Center, NCL, Pashan Road, from 10:30am to 12-noon.

Abstract of the talk – Radio Frequency Identification

Product, people and document identification is now a huge challenge. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) offers an active ID mechanism that requires no intervention on the part of the user. This presentation will introduce the RFID technology, positioning and its variants. The speaker will also introduce Near Field Communication (NFC) and its differences with regular RFID. RFID and NFC applications across several verticals in India will also be discussed.

About the speaker – Ashim Patil

Mr. Ashim A Patil is the MD & CEO of Infotek Software & Systems Pvt Ltd., also known as i-TEK. Under his leadership i-TEK is one of the leading RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) system integration companies in India. i-TEK has several live RFID sites across verticals like Manufacturing, Banking, Education and Healthcare. i-TEK has to its credit RFID applications like File & Document Tracking, Asset Management, Stores Management, Automatic Vehicle Identification, HNI Tracking and many more, deployed at leading organisations in India.

Mr. Patil has completed his engineering degree from University of Pune in 1998. Fresh out of college, he began his entrepreneurial journey starting an Aptech franchisee which he sold in 3 yrs. After that, he took over an ailing software company in Pune which later on became today’s successful i-TEK under his able guidance. He shifted the focus to RFID when not many were even aware what the acronym stands for.

About Venture Center

Entrepreneurship Development Center (Venture Center) – a CSIR initiative – is a not-for-profit company hosted by the National Chemical Laboratory, Pune. Venture Center strives to nucleate and nurture technology and knowledge-based enterprises by leveraging the scientific and engineering competencies of the institutions in the Pune region in India. The Venture Center is a technology business incubator specializing in technology enterprises offering products and services exploiting scientific expertise in the areas of materials, chemicals and biological sciences & engineering.

About PuneChips

PuneChips is a special interest group on semiconductor design and applications. PuneChips was formed to foster an environment for growth of companies in the semiconductor design and applications segment in the Pune area. Our goal is to build an ecosystem similar to PuneTech for companies in this field, where they can exchange information, consult with experts, and start and grow their businesses.

For more information, see the PuneChips website at http://punechips.com, and/or join the PuneChips mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/punechips. Please forward this mail to anybody in Pune who is interested in renewable energy, solar technologies, semiconductors, chip design, VLSI design, chip testing, and embedded applications.

Fees and registration

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. No registration required.

Interview with Nitin Sonawane – co-founder of Tap ‘n Tap

Featured, Interview, , ,

(Last month, Tap ‘n Tap, a Boston based startup that has a development center in Pune, and which aims to “bring multiple iPad competitors to the market”, announced that it has raised $2.25 million in Series A funding led by New Atlantic Ventures. PuneTech interviewed Nitin Sonawane, co-founder of Tap ‘n Tap, and an ex-Pune-Nashik-ite, who is currently visiting Pune.

For more background on Tap ‘n Tap, see this MIT Tech Review article and this this detailed profile from MassHighTech.com

Disclaimer: Navin is a consultant for Tap ‘n Tap, and hence the PuneTech blog never covered Tap ‘n Tap, in keeping with PuneTech’s editorial policy. However, a Series A funding round is a rare and significant enough occurrence, that we felt justified in post.)

Nitin, congratulations on getting funded. Can you give us an overview of what Tap ‘n Tap does?

Nitin Sonawane is a co-founder of Tap n Tap. Having worked in Pune for a while before moving to the US, he knows from personal experience that Pune has lots of high quality talent available.
Nitin Sonawane is a co-founder of Tap 'n Tap. Having worked in Pune for a while before moving to the US, he knows from personal experience that Pune has lots of high quality talent available.

Tap ‘n Tap is a software and user experience design company. We are building a complete OS for Web connected Tablet devices. Tap ‘n Tap was founded almost two years ago, long before Tablet’s were cool. We envisioned a category of handheld touchscreen devices to conveniently enjoy best of the web at home.

Today people connect to the internet primarily through PCs and smartphones. PCs, while powerful, are not always-on and nearby where people spend time at home. Smartphones, while great on the go, have small displays that limit website viewing. Tablets fill in this gap in our enjoyment of the web at home.

Tablets can be permanently kept in high-traffic areas of the home on the wall or tabletop, and will be always-on while docked. The devices can also be removed from their dock and used in handheld mode at the kitchen table, on the sofa, in your bed, or anywhere in the home.
We believe these devices will become part of the daily life of a family and shared by everyone.

So your product is actually a handheld device targeting family audience for home use. Are you a hardware or a software company, or both?

Tap n Tap is building a full software stack for bringing touch based Home Internet Devices to the market.
Tap 'n Tap, which recently raised $2.25 million, is building a full software stack for bringing touch based "Home Internet Devices" to the market, with the help of their development team in Pune

Good question. We are actually a software and user experience design company. On a Tablet device a great user experience is critical. Now while the UI is what the user sees, behind it needs to be extremely well engineered software.

So Software and User Experience is our core competence. We are partnering with multiple hardware manufacturers, including OEMs, to bring our software solution on their devices.

I believe you’ve been working on this for a while now – before Apple announced the iPad. How does Apple’s entry into this market, and and apparent success of the iPad affect it?

We see the iPad as a very positive development for us. Apple has now established that there is a market for Tablets, and lots of other large players want to follow. We believe we are in a unique position to help them get to the market fast with a high quality product that will be needed to be able to compete effectively.

Apple is a large company which would have put in tons of resources to come up with its offering. How does a small company like yours match up to it?

Our software stack is based on the Android framework. So we are leveraging the work that Google and other open source developers have done for Smartphones. This allows our team to focus on what we really want to focus on – which is to build a really compelling and “wow!” Tablets . While we focus on the core of the Tablet product, Android also allows us to bring great third party applications written for Android smartphones to the Tablet world

If that is the case, what is the barrier to entry for any small company to come up with a similar offering?

History has repeatedly proved that building a really compelling and “wow!” product is very difficult. It cannot be done by just throwing a bunch of developers at it. What is needed is an intersection of top quality design and some really challenging technical problem solving to implement that design. Designing a great user experience requires some very smart usability people, and is something that developers, or “average” “ui designers” cannot really do; and implementing it to perfection requires very talented engineers, and is something that average engineers fail at. What happens when the design calls for capabilities that don’t really exist in the underlying software platform? What happens if a particular feature runs a little too slowly on the given hardware? An average-to-good developer will tweak the design to fit within the limitations of the software/hardware, and in the process killing the user experience without even realizing it. A great engineer will go to great lengths to make it happen without compromising the integrity of the design.

And you think that kind of talent is available in Pune?

Absolutely! Pune definitely has both, the design talent pool and the developer talent pool that can build a product on par with the best in the world. We have already formed the seeding team of both types of people and are actively looking at adding to it.

The process of setting up such a team has been both challenging and fulfilling. Our selection criteria went beyond the traditional ones of experience and software skills. We hired people with the ability to simplify complexity, very good problem solving skills and the ability to come up with multiple solutions to difficult problems and select the one that will appeal to users. Needless to say, they also looked for the ability to work under pressure that start-ups demand. We continue to look for the right talent to add to this strong team.

Why did you pick Pune? How did you go about it?

Pune has long been a high-tech center with a lot of world class colleges in the vicinity. There is high quality talent available and I happen to know this first hand :-).

We decided that for ramping up quickly, instead of starting from scratch, we would be better off partnering with some startup in Pune who could help us build our team. We picked Clarice Technologies because it had a very strong background in both core software technology, as well as usability and user interaction design – a combination that is not only difficult to find, but also absolutely essential to the success of Tap ‘n Tap.

The team in Pune is integrated with the team in Boston, we’re involved in all the hiring decisions, and as far as we are concerned, every member of the team is a Tap ‘n Tap employee.

Also, we are not viewing the India team as a source of cheap labour for low-end work. We want to tap the Pune talent pool and are willing to pay for it. The team here has the entire responsibility for a bunch of modules of the software stack. This includes everything, right from conceptualization of that the requirements for the module would be, to architecture, design and implementation. If you take a look at some of the things our team here has done, you’d think it came from Google or Apple. Their work so far is really world class and we expect that to continue and grow.

India/China better markets today for tech startups – Ajit Shelat, SVP, Nevis Networks

Featured, Interview, , , , , , ,
Ajit Shelat Nevis Networks
Ajit Shelat, Senior Vice President of Engineering, Nevis Networks

Nevis Networks, a mostly-Pune-based-company (with “official” headquarters in the US, and an additional center in China), builds network switches and other network hardware that allows a company to secure it’s internal network from attacks and to enforce identity-based security policies. The company’s LANenforcer product family transparently protects the network from external malicious attacks, and also allows restricting access to different network resources based on users’ identities according to policies set by the system administrators. This can be customized to ensure different levels of access to different classes of users, employees, contractors, guests and other third parties. In addition, the product allows detailed reporting, auditing, employee activity reports that make it possible to analyze security breaches in very granular detail. And because it is hardware based, all of this is delivered in realtime with very low latency.

Nevis Networks’ customers range from financial services, healthcare, education and defense contractors and they deploy Nevis LANenforcers to protect sensitive network resources and assets, with an intention of reducing the overall costs and time to resolve security breaches and conduct network audits. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, with additional R&D centers in Pune, India and Beijing, China.

The ongoing recession has hit Nevis Networks hard, and it downsized a very large fraction of its workforce late last year. On top of that, on Monday, in a report title “LSI Acquires Manpower Team of Navis Networking”, CXOToday implied that the company (which they alternately identified as Navis Networks or Nevis Networks in the article) had shutdown and the team taken over by LSI. Specifically, this is what CXOToday said:

With recession being an opportunity to invest for big MNCs, LSI Technologies, a provider of innovative silicon, systems and software technologies has acquired the team of Navis Networking based at Pune. With the R&D unit based out of Mountain View, California shutting down, LSI has acquired the manpower of the captive R&D centre in India.

After hearing from PuneTech readers that this report is misleading, we caught up with Ajit Shelat, Senior Vice President of Engineering for Nevis Networks, to learn that the reports of Nevis’ demise have been greatly exaggerated. Here is a quick report of the conversation we had with Ajit:

On the news that LSI has “acquired” the “manpower” of Nevis but not the company.

The report by CXOToday is misleading. What actually happened is much simpler. Due to the economic downturn last year, Nevis Networks was looking to downsize some of its workforce. A friendly interaction between the respective managements of Nevis and LSI led to movement of some of Nevis manpower to LSI. This was a simple case of Nevis ex-employees being hired by LSI en masse. It does not represent any sort of acquisition or even agreement between Nevis and LSI. And these are certainly not the entire team of Nevis Networks India, as implied by the CXOToday article.

In any case, Nevis networks is not shutting down. It continues to execute on a with strategy and focus.

On the current status of Nevis Networks

Nevis networks core team is still there and it is going strong. In fact, the last quarter was quite good and has been the best quarter for Nevis since the inception of the company.

What has happened is that due to the downturn, Nevis shifted its focus away from the US market to the India and China markets, reduced its workforce in the US and in India, and this new strategy appears to be working for them.

On the surprising fact that India/China are better markets than the US market

Since Nevis Networks is selling cutting edge technology, one would have expected US to be the logical market for these products. However, people really underestimate the extent of the effect the economic recession is having on the market there. While the markets really melted around September 2008, the signs have been obvious for at least an year before that, and starting Nov/Dec 2007, Nevis had started planning its strategy of shifting focus away from the US market to the India/China markets.

In tune with their new strategy, Nevis substantially reduced its India workforce. They continue to support existing customers in the US, but new customers are coming mainly from India – which is apparently not affected by the recession as much. In general, it is easier for a company with mainly Indian promoters to sell in India than in other countries.

China is another country where sales are expected to grow – Nevis is in the process of stengthening its sales presence in China. The Chinese market, having a significantly different character, takes a longer ramp up time to achieve its full potential – though a very good start has been made in terms of immediate sales. Like other markets, achieving full potential is really a function of getting the right people on the ground, and building the right relationships and customer confidence. All this effort is justified by the fact that the Chinese market has the potential to scale up dramatically.

More about Nevis Networks

Nevis Networks was founded in 2002 with the intention of building a network security solution with high speed and low latency, using its proprietary ASIC-based technology. As of last year, Nevis had raised a total of US$40 million in three rounds of funding from premier venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates, BlueRun Ventures (formerly Nokia Venture Partners) and New Path Ventures LLC. We are told that their funding situation has recently changed and an announcement to this effect is expected in the next couple of weeks.

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project comes to Pune – Please join

Events, Featured, , , , , , ,
100 dollar laptop: production prototype
Image via Wikipedia

The One Laptop per Child association develops a low-cost laptop—the “XO Laptop”—to revolutionize how we educate the world’s children. Their mission is “to provide educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.”

Now a bunch of volunteers have banded together to take the OLPC initiative forward in Pune. If you believe in this mission, you should join them. They will have a kickoff meeting on Sunday (1st March 2009) to decide how to take this forward. This would be a good place to find out more about the project and see how you can contribute. You don’t need to be a technical person to contribute.

If you are unable to attend this event, but would still like to contribute, join the OLPC India mailing list. For more details, see the OLPC Pune wiki.

Details: OLPC Camp Pune

What: Kickoff meeting for volunteers interested in furthering the cause of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) group in Pune.
When: 9am-5pm, Sunday, 1st March, 2009
Where: Room No. 207, Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research (SICSR), 1st Floor, Atur Centre, Gokhale Cross Road, Model Colony, Pune. Map.
Registration and Fees: This event is free for anyone to attend. You are requested to register here.

Tentative Schedule:

Time Room No.207 Session conducted by
0845 Coffee and registration
0900 Introduction and Agenda Review
0915 XO World – Why, What, Where To Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay from The Fedora Project
1215 Break for Lunch
1300 Localization of Sugar -Introduction and Getting Started Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay from The Fedora Project
1400 Digital Bridge Foundation (DBF)- Introduction Amit Gogna from Digital Bridge Foundation
1500 Starting OLPC Pune Deployment – Road Ahead Open Discussion
1600 Break for Tea
1615 To be Scheduled …
Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

What is multi-core architecture and why you need to understand it

In Depth, Technology, ,

Dhananjay Nene has just written a brilliant article in which he gives a detailed overview of multi-core architectures for computer CPUs – why they came about, how they work, and why you should care. Yesterday, Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent Systems, while speaking at the IndicThreads conference on Java Technologies exhorted all programmers to understand multi-core architectures and program to take advantage of the possibilities they provide. Dhananjay’s article is thus very timely for both, junior programmers who wish to understand why Anand was attaching so much importance to this issue, and what they need to do about it, and also for managers in infotech to understand how they need to deal with that issue.

Dhananjay sets the stage with this lovely analogy where he compares the CPU of your computer with superman (Kal-El) and then multi-core is explained thus:

One fine morning Kal’s dad Jor-El knocked on your door and announced that Kal had a built in limitation that he was approaching, and that instead of doubling his productivity every year, he shall start cloning himself once each year (even though they would collectively draw the same salary). Having been used to too much of the good life you immediately exclaimed – “But thats preposterous – One person with twice the standard skill set is far superior to 2 persons with a standard skill set, and many years down the line One person with 64 times the standard skill sets is far far far superior to 64 persons with a standard skill set”. Even as you said this you realised your reason for disappointment and consternation – the collective Kal family was not going to be doing any lesser work than expected but the responsibility of ensuring effective coordination across 64, 128 and 256 Kals now lay upon you the manager, and that you realised was a burden extremely onerous to imagine and even more so to carry. However productive the Kal family was, the weakest link in the productivity was now going to be you the project manager. That in a nutshell is the multicore challenge, and that in a nutshell is the burden that some of your developers shall need to carry in the years to come.

What is to be done? First is to understand which programs are well suited to take advantage of a multi-core architecture, and which ones:

if Kal had been working on one single super complex project, the task of dividing up the activities across his multiple siblings would be very onerous, but if Kal was working on a large number of small projects, it would be very easy to simply distribute the projects across the various Kal’s and the coordination and management effort would be unlikely to increase much.

Dhananjay goes into more detail on this and many other issues, that I am skimming over. For example:

Some environments lend themselves to easier multi threading / processing and some make it tough. Some may not support multi threading at all. So this will constrain some of your choices and the decisions you make. While Java and C and C++ all support multi threading, it is much easier to build multi threaded programs in Java than in C or C++. While Python supports multi threading building processes with more than a handful of threads will run into the GIL issue which will limit any further efficiency improvements by adding more threads. Almost all languages will work with multi processing scenarios.

If you are a programmer or a manager of one, you should read the entire article.  In fact, as we mentioned in  a previous PuneTech post (Why Python is better than Java), you should really subscribe to his blog. He writes detailed and insightful articles that, as a techie, you would do well to read. If you are interested in programming languages, I would recommend reading “Contrasting java and dynamic languages”, and “Performance Comparison – C++ / Java / Python / Ruby/ Jython / JRuby / Groovy”. And if you are a blogger, check out his tips for software/programming blogging.

Dhananjay is a Pune-based software Engineer with 17 years in the field. Passionate about software engineering, programming, design and architecture. For more info, check out his PuneTech wiki profile.

Narendra Karmarkar’s recent research

Narendra Karmarkar, ,

After working on the Interior Point Method, Karmarkar worked on a new architecture for supercomputing, based on concepts from projective geometry. Currently, he is synthesizing these concepts with some new ideas he calls sculpturing free space (a non-linear analogue of what has has popularly been described as folding the perfect corner). This approach allows him to extend this work to the physical design of machines. He is now publishing updates on his recent work on PuneTech.

Upcoming Presentations:

Narendra will be presenting new paradigm as follows:

16th July 2008: “Vacuum nanoelectronics devices from the perspective of optimization theory“, The 21st International Vacuum Nanoelectronics Conference in Wroc?aw, Poland, on July 13-17, 2008.

25th July 2008: “Seminar on Massively Parallel Systems and Global Optimization“, Computation Research in Boston, at  Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nevis Networks Named as Finalist for the Red Herring 100 North America 2008 Award

News, ,

Nevis Networks, which builds secure switching and identity-based policy enforcement appliances, today announced that it has been named as a finalist for the Red Herring 100 Award, a selection of the 100 North American private companies playing a leading role in innovation and technology. This marks the third year that Nevis Networks has achieved finalist status, in addition to winning Red Herring’s “10 Private Security Companies to Watch” in 2006. Red Herring’s editorial staff chose the finalists after evaluating some 1200 private companies through a careful analysis of various criteria including financial data, quality of management, execution of strategy, and dedication to research and development.

Source: Press Release.