Seminar by Lluc Alvarez (BSC - Barcelona Supercomputing Center): "From Open Source to Silicon: Reptiles and the Journey with Open Hardware Tape-Out" (introduced by Cesar Fuguet - MADMAX team)

Abstract: 
Open-source hardware is rapidly transforming how researchers and engineers design, validate, and prototype new processor designs. This keynote shares practical experiences and lessons learned from working on Reptiles, an open-source muticore platform built upon previous open-source projects such as OpenPiton and the HPDCache, highlighting how these projects enable faster innovation and stronger collaboration across institutions. The talk will detail the development workflow used in Reptiles, which includes integrating and extending existing open-source components, improving performance and functionality, and preparing the design for silicon implementation. The talk will highlight the lessons learned throughout this journey, addressing both the technical opportunities and the engineering challenges that arise when moving from open-source research projects to real-world tape-outs with advanced technology nodes.

Lluc ALVAREZ is a leading researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). He received his B.Sc. degree from the Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB) in 2006 and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in 2009 and 2015, respectively. He is the leader of the ’UNCORE: Cache Hierarchies and Interconnects’ group at BSC, he has been the principal investigator and coordinator of the eProcessor project, and he is currently leading technical tasks in the Barcelona Zettascale Lab and the DARE projects. His main research interests are cache hierarchies and on-chip interconnection networks for high-performance computing systems, accelerators for bioinformatics applications, benchmarking and performance verification of microprocessors.