1 of 25

Lessons in Open-Source Hardware

From The UC System

Jonathan Balkind

2 of 25

Introducing Myself

Assistant Prof, UC Santa Barbara CS
Co-direct the ArchLab
Lead Architect of OpenPiton
Research in Computer Architecture, Programming Languages, and Operating Systems
Focused on free and open source silicon (FOSSi)
Teach a 1st year seminar on open source

3 of 25

Motivation

4 of 25

OpenPiton

Open-source manycore (since 2015)
P-Mesh coherence scales to ½ billion cores
Configurable core, uncore
Used in 60+ published academic works
Built into real chips by us and others (including Intel!)

5 of 25

Lessons Learned from OpenPiton

In 2020 we took a retrospective look at OpenPiton after 5 years open source
Shared advice and lessons learned

Design philosophy
Maintaining open infrastructure
Closing the loop
Evolution and ongoing improvements

6 of 25

UC as a Centre for Excellence in OSH

Huge amount of OSH IP spun out or maintained by University of California researchers

Berkeley: RISC-V, Chipyard, FireSim, …
Santa Cruz: OpenRAM, LiveHD, snnTorch, …
San Diego: OpenROAD, …
Davis: Gem5, …
Santa Barbara: PyRTL, OpenPiton
Los Angeles: DSAGEN, …

7 of 25

Our Concept

Often our only documentation is from papers and code
I wanted to share lessons and advice from experts across all these UC-originated projects
We are creating a centralised location for advice talks, interviews, and tutorials from UC experts
We call it Open UC Hardware (OUCH) Advice

Trying to help with newcomers' pain points

8 of 25

Creating a Compelling and Sustainable Tutorial

Meta-tutorial at ASPLOS 2023

9 of 25

ASPLOS 2023 Meta-Tutorial Pitch

Perhaps you’ve got a great new research project that you’d like to share with the world. Maybe you built a new open-source simulator or hardware design that you want to encourage others to adopt. A natural next step is to consider creating a tutorial to advertise the work and generate a user base. That sounds like a lot of work! And would you really give it more than once?

This tutorial is intended to help lower the barrier to entry of creating an academic tutorial in architecture and related fields. Attendees will develop their goals, learn about best practices, and start to think about the nuts and bolts of running a tutorial. We will focus on enabling tutorials which are repeatable to amortise the startup effort and attract interest over longer timescales.

10 of 25

ASPLOS 2023 Meta-Tutorial

Organised with Sagar Karandikar, Elba Garza, Zach Sisco, Nazerke Turtayeva

Topics included:

- Defining goals

- Identifying and targeting an audience

- The pedagogy of choosing tutorial-friendly content

- Hands-on demos - software and hardware

- Nuts and bolts: scheduling

- Gathering and incorporating attendee feedback

- Sustainability and reproducibility

11 of 25

High-level Advice

High level points

Prepare
Practice
Entertainment value and user experience
Design for longevity
Live demos are hard
Collect audience feedback
Cautionary tales
You will organise at the last minute
Advertise!

12 of 25

Lasting Documentation/Products

Beyond the learnings for our one-time attendees, we are sharing:

Meta-tutorial slides, recording, transcript
Materials ready to run a repeat meta-tutorial
OpenPiton Tutorial Lessons Learned documentation

13 of 25

UC Expert Advice

Workshop/Special Session at FOSSi Latch-Up

14 of 25

Sharing UC Expert Advice

Want to encourage newcomers to open hardware in academia
Special session at FOSSi Foundation's Latch-Up conference in Santa Barbara

Experience-based advice from running influential projects
Lessons learned from teaching using open-source hardware tools

Funded undergraduate attendee travel for their first conference
Lots of networking opportunities!

15 of 25

Four In-Person Speakers' Talks

Prof Guthaus, UCSC

Prof Beamer, UCSC

Jerry Zhao, UC Berkeley

Prof Renau, UCSC

16 of 25

Newcomers' Perspectives

Lightning Talks at FOSSi Latch-Up

17 of 25

Newcomers' Perspectives

We solicited for full-length and lightning talks
Lightning talks included 5 talks from undergraduates and MS students
Summarising experience building and using open-source hardware for research and education
Videos are a great resource both for newcomers and established community members

18 of 25

BS and MS Student Lightning Talks

19 of 25

UC Expert Interviews

20 of 25