European Universities Join OpenSPARC

Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Europractice today announced a three-year collaboration to promote OpenSPARC CMT (Chip Multithreading) technology -- one of the only open sourced multi-core, multithreaded processor architectures--as a reference design among 650 universities and research institutions across 38 countries in the European region. Europractice is a European Union-backed non-profit microelectronics design stimulation project managed by the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

OpenSPARC is an open source hardware project started in December 2005. The initial contribution to the project was Sun Microsystems' Register transfer level (RTL) Verilog code for a full 64-bit, 32-thread microprocessor, the UltraSPARC T1 processor. On 21 March 2006, Sun released the source code to the T1 IP core under the GNU General Public License.

On December 11, 2007, Sun also made the UltraSPARC T2 processor's RTL available via the OpenSPARC project.^[1]

http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/open_source_hardware

Open Source Hardware?

One of the things that cropped up in the European software patents debate at the start of the year was the issue of defining what a software patent actually is. You'd think it was easy, but it's not. Software patents sneak through by reference to the computers they actually run on (a software patent I have to hand starts "Two computers A and B each have a clipboard function..." - that's a European one, by the way). And even chip designs turn out to be a grey area.

I recently had the opportunity to meet some of the team designing the new UltraSPARC T1 processor ("Niagara") and saw first-hand what my friends up the road at Southampton University have been pointing out for years. While there's a good deal of skill in the instantiation, a silicon chip these days is "just" the compiled version of a software design. A chip like the UltraSPARC T1 is actually a huge Verilog program compiled to atoms instead of assembly language.

The reason I found all this out is that the team has decided it's time for the Participation Age to reach into the world of chip design. Nestling among all the other excellent announcements about low energy, high performance computers in today's launch event is an announcement that to me is quite revolutionary. SPARC is going open source.

Yes, you read that right. The Verilog source code, tools and more behind the UltraSPARC T1 (the "design point") will be released under an OSI-approved open source license next year - OpenSPARC - and a community will hopefully be forming to use that design point for any purpose that's interesting. I think that's revolutionary.

Of course, open source hardware doesn't work the same way open source software does. Because the "compilation" process is so heavy, the community won't be working on a single rapidly-iterated shared tree of source. It's likely to work more like the Jini community, with many co-operating community participants doing their own thing with a common baseline and then contributing back innovations and fixes based on their experience.

I'll be helping as much as I can to get this off the ground, and learning a lot in the process. It's heading into uncharted territory and there's plenty of opportunity to "learn through corrected error" but I think the new OpenSPARC community is the start of something big, the perfect complement to OpenSolaris.