Ron Wilson of Altera posted a short piece about the IoT and two contrasting viewpoints about its structure. This is worth a look!

This guide will show you how to cross-compile SPEC2006 for Alpha using your regular old Ubuntu machine running on Intel. In particular, I have done this so that they can be run in gem5 for the Alpha ISA. I assume that you have a copy of the SPEC benchmarks and the input vectors. Extract SPEC2006 …

In this guide, I will walk you through a quick way to get gem5 built for the Alpha ISA using a Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit host. I have not tried these methods on any other platform. If you get stuck, you can always refer to the documentation at gem5.org. Nothing is presented here that doesn’t already exist …

If you’re into hardware acceleration and heterogeneous computing, this is a good read. Currently, FPGAs are not commonly used by programmers to accelerate their workloads due to the difficulty of hardware design compared to software. OpenCL support potentially changes the game by allowing FPGA …

Today, while working on my fellowship application, I was pondering the nature of graduate research and how one comes up with truly novel ideas. My friend and colleague, Lucas Wanner, sent me this transcription of a talk Richard Hamming gave many years ago on how one does great research. I found it …

First post! I’ll be blogging about my experiences as a Ph.D student in electrical engineering at UCLA. It may just be thoughts and insights about grad school, tips for other engineers and students on specific topics, and other stuff. We’ll see! For now, here’s a picture of a LeafLabs Maple board …