The All About OpenSPARC Slidecast are 12 modules of on-line training by designers, developers, and programmers who worked on the creation of the UltraSPARC T1 and T2 microprocessors. These are made available to guide users as they develop their own OpenSPARC designs and to assist professors as they teach the next generation of processor designers. The twelve chapters cover the different aspects of OpenSPARC and together are equivalent to a 2 day technical OpenSPARC workshop.

The slidecasts (presentation with a voiceover), the PDF files and the star/openoffice files are available. We are providing this material under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The winners of the OpenSPARC Community Innovation Awards Contest designed to fuel innovation around chip technology. The contest was part of Sun's Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program, a multi-year program running across several open source communities with a $1 Million total prize.

"Sun developed the Open Source Community Innovation Awards Program to foster innovation on a global level and recognize the most interesting initiatives within open source communities worldwide," said Shrenik Mehta, Senior Director of Frontend Technologies and OpenSPARC program for Sun Microsystems. "The winners ranged from professors and students in the academia to developers working in the industry, all of whom demonstrated extraordinary creativity and collaboration leading to some outstanding innovations that will have a very real impact on the OpenSPARC community."

The OpenSPARC Contest Award categories and winners include the following:

• Grand Prize - Martin Johansson, Jiri Gaisler of Gaisler Research
• Best University Level Computer Architecture and/or VLSI course - Mark McDermott, Professor at the University of Texas, Austin
• Best New Bus Interface Creation as a contribution to the OpenSPARC community - Martin Johansson, Jiri Gaisler of Gaisler Research
• Best Demo of an Application running on an FPGA - Martin Johansson, Jiri Gaisler of Gaisler Research
• Best Adaptation of a Single-thread Application to a Multi-thread CMT Environment - Andrey Brito, PhD student at the Systems Engineering Group at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany.
• Best submission that makes a substantial contribution to the OpenSPARC community and does not constitute any of the other mentioned categories - Kushal Datta, Graduate student at University of North Carolina

At the International Conference for Field Programmable Logic and Applications today, Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Xilinx, Inc. unveiled a feature-rich, high-performance programmable OpenSPARC evaluation platform. The platform provides academic researchers and hardware developers with a flexible OpenSPARC-based platform to create, customize and deploy next-generation applications for a broad set of end markets including supercomputers, industrial, scientific and medical (ISM), aerospace & defense, and storage and networking.

"Our collaboration with industry leaders such as Xilinx will continue to drive the momentum and expansion of the UltraSPARC ecosystem," said Mike Knudsen, vice president, business development and marketing for Sun's Microelectronics unit. "The microprocessor industry is steadily shifting towards CMT architectures, and this new OpenSPARC FPGA evaluation platform puts us in a prime position to enable faster time-to-market for our customers."

Sun Microsystems, Inc., with the support of the Embedded Software Consortium under the Ministry of Education announced today the partnership with National Taiwan University, National Tsing Hua University, and National Chiao Tung University to promote OpenSPARC technology development.

In an announcment held on July 7th, in Taipei, Sridhar Vajapey, Sun Microsystems, gave the opening and talked about OpenSPARC program followed by Dr. Shyu, Dean of EECS of Tsing Hua University, representing MOE's SoC program, and Dr. Lee, Professor of Tsing Hua University and Director for MOE's ESW program, followed by Joe Pai, Sun's GM for Taiwan. All were very thankful to Sun for making such leading design and technology to Taiwan's institution and were giving a very high expectation on how this program would potentially benefit Taiwan's technology and industrial advancement in the future. 

The OpenSPARC T2 processor is based on the UltraSPARC T2 processor, the world's fastest commodity processor with eight cores and eight threads per core.

Read more for new features in release 1.1

New Features in the Release 1.6 of  OpenSPARC T1

• T1 core supports single- and four-thread options on FPGAs
  
• Reference designs boot OpenSolaris on single- or four-thread mode
  
• Xilinx Virtex-5 technology support
  
• Networking (ftp, telnet) support

These new features are designed to enable a user to build real systems using the OpenSPARC T1 core. For further details on Xilinx, please refer to the Xilinx University program.

Eight major universities are now official OpenSPARC Technology Centers of Excellence:

• University of California, Santa Cruz
• University of Texas, Austin
• University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Carnegie Mellon University
• Stanford University
• University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
• Peking University, China
  

Each Center of Excellence has a minimum two-year commitment, during which time they'll execute chip design research and course work based on Sun's chip multi-threading (CMT) design.

Visit our Centers of Excellence web page.

Collaborate and share course material related to OpenSPARC, chip multi-threading, multi-core in many areas including hardware design, design tools, CMT Architecture, software systems design, operating systems, concurrent computing and other related areas.  We're looking for professors who have a passion for teaching and contributing to their field of study by sharing their course material with others.

Take a look at site we are developing and the course materials already available:
http://wiki.opensparc.net/bin/view.pl/CourseMaterial.

We thankful for the support and generosity of professors who choose to share their research, pedagogy, and knowledge to benefit others.