AAP Talk at FOSDEM 2016

by Ed Jones

At the end of this month, Simon, Jeremy and myself will be attending FOSDEM. This will be my second time attending and my first time giving a presentation, and I hope it will be as entertaining as it was last year.

My presentation will be on AAP (An Altruistic Processor), an architecture of our own design which aims to improve generic LLVM support for more peculiar architectural design features. In my presentation I’ll talk about why AAP exists, how it is designed and the current state of the tools. Afterwards, Simon will give his own talk on the use of the LLVM infrastructure to build a simulator for AAP.

I will give the presentation as part of the LLVM Toolchain devroom, you can find the time and location here.

As I spent a lot of time working on LLVM I expect to spent a lot of my time at FOSDEM on the LLVM and Embedded System tracks, however there are a lot of other talks which have piqued my interest (you can view the schedule here). A few talks which look particularly good are:

“IoT meets Security”
Given the constant stream of IoT security failures, I am quite interested
in any attempts to address the problem. Free and Open Source software has
typically been very strong when it comes to security, and I expect this to
remain true with the advent of the IoT.

“Crazyflie 2.0”
Quadcopters are always fun, and that’s even more true of programmable ones.
After the Crazyflie talk at FOSDEM last year we got one at the office, and
I’m interested in seeing what improvements have been made since then.

“Open Source is being ruined and it’s all our fault”
As someone who works in an open source software business, I am interested
in what other business models are being used.

Although most of my work is on LLVM, I am also working on MAGEEC and Superoptimization as part of the TSERO project. MAGEEC is a framework to enable compilers to make optimization decisions using machine learners, and Superoptimization aims to produce near perfect code sequence through a brute force (or intelligent) search of the instruction set. If you’re attending FOSDEM and want to talk, you can collar me after my presentation, or get in contact and we can meet up.