Choosing to use Linux means approaching a door through which is a deeper understanding of how computers work. In my opinion, completing a LFS project, or at least understanding what happens in a LFS project, is like a capstone to the sentiment in the first sentence.
I live in Mexico City, one of the largest cities in the world. As all large cities, it has its ghastly demons. I am willing to argue that the one lying below it makes it unique in the world — We live atop what remains of a lake. Of course, it is not visible at plain sight (I would not surround it in this mystery setting otherwise): Our city is not Amsterdam or Venice, embracing the water, but we seem to hide it as if we were ashamed of it — there is a small surviving fraction of the once great Texcoco lake in the city’s South East, in the touristic Xochimilco borough, plus a wider region in the North East that just refused to go away, but has been historically shunned by everybody.
The lake, however invisible, is far from dry: Although it is mostly mud, it does contain some water pockets that are harvested to help our 22 million people have running water. That, of course, together with an impressive set of aqueducts bringing water from over 400Km away.
For this post I will walk you through a project with a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), which was interfaced with a hand constructed clock circuit (an astable multivibrator).
External circuit to be interfaced with Mojo v3 FPGA development board
In 2017, General Electric (GE), one of the largest American companies that specializes in oil and gas, healthcare, aviation and software development, and Eurelectric, the union of the electric industry in Europe, partnered to create an Ecomagination Challenge hackathon. Ecomagination refers to “GE’s growth strategy to enhance resource productivity and reduce environmental impact at a global scale through commercial solutions for our customers and through our own operations”. The focus was on building digital solutions to help decarbonize energy and transportation in Europe, and the hackathon was held in Berlin between June 12-13, where over 100 participants from around the world came together to compete on solving the two challenges presented: Electrification and Advanced Manufacturing. Continue reading
A few years ago, while I was a graduate student in Greece, I was preparing slides for my talk at the SIAM Parallel Processing 2012 conference. While showing my slides to one of my colleagues, one of his comments was: “All good, but why do you guys doing numerical linear algebra and parallel computing always use the Message Passing Interface to communicate between the processors?”. Having read* the book review of Beresford Parlett in [1], I did have the wit to imitate Marvin Minsky and reply “Is there any other way?”. Nowadays, this question is even more interesting, and my answer would certainly be longer (perhaps too long!). Execution of programs in distributed computing environments requires communication between the processors. It is then natural to consider by what protocols and guidelines should the processors communicate with each other? This is the question to which the Message Passing Interface (MPI) has been the answer for more than 25 years.