tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-275402312024-02-03T00:44:02.632-08:00Reconfigurable ComputingThis blog is a notebook of my thoughts on parallel programming and accelerated computing. The instruction stream is deprecated: parallel programming is a spreadsheet.Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.comBlogger107125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-32853365029741848072013-11-05T09:38:00.000-08:002013-11-14T10:28:12.870-08:00The Stanford Startup and the MIT StartupMessage from a Jedi to a Young Padawan
When I graduated and was considering pursuing startups, an alum from my fraternity gave me some advice. He was a successful entrepreneur and sent me a message about pursuing technology-oriented startups. He presented a maxim about an MIT company and a Stanford company building products for the same market. The Stanford company gets a product out quicklyAmirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-3557746369609997092012-10-28T14:42:00.002-07:002012-10-31T17:33:35.547-07:00Fear and Loathing at Zigfu: My YCombinator ExperienceApplications for YCombinator's winter 2013 cycle are due October 30. Let me tell you about my experience in YCombinator with Zigfu.
Zigfu is a platform for making motion controlled applications using the Kinect in Unity3D and HTML. We incorporated as Motion Arcade Inc. in May 2011 and went through the YCombinator program in Summer 2011. During my interview with YCombinator, I pitched a company Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-43721753671429097242012-10-05T20:56:00.004-07:002012-10-09T03:14:40.140-07:00Zigfu HCI, and Terminator: Ad-hoc Skeleton TrackingI haven't had a brain dump in a while, and I should probably write more since this blog gets a ton of visitors for some reason. I'm excited about a lot of technology that I've read up on lately and will touch on some before diving into object tracking.
I've read a lot of really interesting papers about transmitting information using orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light and a 2.4 Tbps Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-31094677325455972482012-03-20T20:15:00.000-07:002012-03-20T20:16:23.887-07:00Google's Weakness: User ExperiencePaul Graham pointed out that someone could take advantage of Google's UX weakness in his article identifying a new search engine as a potentially disrupt-able industry for a highly ambitious founder.Google might not realize this, but they have a huge gaping weakness in User Experience. I have one Facebook account. I have 6 or 7 Google accounts. And they don't work well together. When I Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-26905142381054989112012-01-26T23:12:00.000-08:002012-01-26T23:13:01.405-08:00OpenCL/CUDA for FPGAsI noticed Altera announcing OpenCL support for FPGAs. Here's a paper and some slides on it. I also noticed a blog pop up last week about doing OpenCL on Xilinx.
There's also been work on a CUDA->FPGA system called FCUDA from a group from UIUC and UCLA (here's the longer paper on FCUDA).
So hardening GPU-designed algorithms is now at least an idea, and possibly a good one. This will enable CMOS Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-24975062816455333112011-10-24T23:03:00.000-07:002011-10-25T22:00:38.052-07:00Making a TV for SteveThe TV space is ripe for disruption, and I keep seeing speculation about an Apple Television. In his biography interviews, Steve Jobs claimed to have "finally cracked" the TV user experience.Last week I presented my start-up ZigFu at the Microsoft Venture Capital Summit and said that motion-control technology like Kinect will be as disruptive to the TV as the remote-control or possibly even colorAmirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-24283012174417563952011-08-24T01:36:00.000-07:002011-08-24T02:15:22.493-07:00ZigFu - Motion AppsWell, the cat's out of the bag. We've been doing YCombinator this summer developing a motion apps company we're calling ZigFu. Something's gotta pay for all the lasers...
Today was the YC demo day and we got some nice press today in GigaOM and Forbes which put us on their short-lists.
And that's one demo day down... still another one tomorrow, but now they'll already be anticipating something Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-88612117394712664172011-03-11T00:31:00.000-08:002011-03-11T01:09:37.983-08:00The Persistence of Data: Why the future is write-onceI went to an interesting discussion called "Big IT meets Big Web" today hosted by Battery Ventures which brought together a bunch of nerds to talk about the harmonic convergences of IT and Web worlds and deploying services in the cloud. One idea that struck me, was that many of these companies have huge data stores that are never erased. This means we have too many features in the magnetic disks Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-64632054681301682532011-03-02T20:27:00.000-08:002011-03-02T20:30:03.981-08:00Cutting with Kinect( tinkerheavy.com ) Using Kinect to make Little Red Riding Hood cut up stuff. Fruit Ninjas and Veggie Samurais better get ready for the Sushi Wars.I'm using the Object Slicer package and my Unity wrapper for OpenNI.NET / Kinect.Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-36299902465133243392011-01-27T01:15:00.000-08:002011-01-27T01:16:38.382-08:00Kinect PoiAmirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-89717805410393497672011-01-23T04:26:00.000-08:002011-01-23T04:27:46.654-08:00Unity + Kinect + RopeScript = MaceAmirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-58643858316288750072011-01-21T01:21:00.000-08:002011-01-21T22:05:47.081-08:00More Kinect Hacking(tinkerheavy.com) This is a demonstration of the Unity wrapper for OpenNI. My skeleton is tracked as I move in front of the Kinect. My feet are rigid-bodies that can kick the boxes. The boxes are also carryable if two hands interact with it simultaneously.If you already have OpenNI+NITE working with your kinect, the binary for this project (pc and mac) is here:http://tinkerheavy.com/Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-76464547739347122002010-12-29T19:30:00.000-08:002010-12-29T19:33:46.695-08:00Kinect HackingI've been hacking the kinect for the last few days. This Little Red character was developed for an upcoming iPad interactive story from my company Tinker Heavy Industries. We've done this with a few other characters. There are some issues with the joint orientation which means my arm goes up and her arm goes down...Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-85637885848157857522010-11-23T02:53:00.000-08:002010-11-23T04:32:46.523-08:00Intel Atom, now with an Altera FPGA!/. points to this article which says that Intel is putting together an Atom and an FPGA into a single package and selling it for somewhere in the $61-100 range in lots of 1000. This is Intel competing with ARM for the embedded space. We all saw the tighter integration of x86 and FPGA coming 5 years ago when hard PowerPC started finding their way into Xilinx V2 Pros. Achronix is already using Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-59111903352341170832010-11-17T03:27:00.000-08:002010-11-17T14:06:46.136-08:00Ten Things to do with an EC2 GPUYesterday I was saying we'll see crypto cracking on EC2 with GPUs. In addition to writing it on this blog, I enthusiastically proposed it to friends who are into this sorta thing and of course we then discovered that someone already did it so we lose all novelty points now and should just go back to thinking about how to make money using cloud based GPUs.I've been writing about this for five Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-67093455388053074182010-11-15T01:45:00.000-08:002010-11-15T01:52:01.423-08:00GPGPU on EC2Looks like you can get some NVidia Teslas in an EC2 instance now! It seems like Amazon is in the business of selling you a teraflop for $2.10 per hour. This is going to be a big competitive business. I presume I can get a petaflop for a few minutes for under a hundred bucks. Time to start making crypto-crackers!Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-85824563761153707332010-10-26T00:25:00.000-07:002010-10-26T01:06:54.717-07:00First ProductIn June, I started a company to make apps for kids. Now Tinker Heavy Industries has its first app in the app store:Another educational app to teach spelling is currently awaiting Apple's approval. Our next app will be an interactive Little Red Riding Hood. We've done some work learning how to build touchable characters and environments. Here's a demo of me playing with Tinker, our Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-49636261072223348612010-07-25T18:26:00.000-07:002010-07-25T18:39:38.333-07:00Career ChangeSince 2007, I had been developing a PDP-11/70 emulator using Virtex-5 FPGAs for Quickware. The QED970 system is composed of several boards designed to be compatible with legacy hardware specifications. Designing a replica of a 1970's machine revealed a lot to me about the way it used to be; I can hardly imagine designing entire boards with LSI and MSI components to be a Floating Point Unit. An Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-91837469920015145222010-03-02T03:33:00.000-08:002010-03-02T04:10:45.083-08:00GPU Supercomputing Rundown/. linked to this opinion article on AMD, Intel and NVidia in the next decade (full disclosure, I own shares in NVidia). Some of the opinions about OpenCL and CUDA are the same as I expressed in my post about Intel purchasing RapidMind and Cilk. Since I made that post, Intel has decided to abandon plans to release Larabee as a consumer GPU. This was not a big surprise, since Larabee could not Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-15414967459165824562010-02-04T00:04:00.000-08:002010-02-04T00:08:42.490-08:00More on SaaS and EDAEDA SaaS has been a recurring topic on many of the blogs I follow. Harry (the asic guy) wrote about the Blooming of an EDA SaaS Revolution in his first post at Xuropa. He says that the revolution "depends on a confluence of critical technologies." He also writes that the coming revolution will level the playing field allowing smaller EDA firms to compete. The same economics of sharing model that Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-6099623357667927562009-11-02T01:27:00.000-08:002009-11-02T10:41:56.475-08:00Altium Nanoboard 3000: Day 1I received an Altium Nanoboard 3000 with the condition that I provide feedback on my experience using it. I hope this information will be useful to Altium and to other Nanoboard users.This will be the first in a multi-part series about using the Altium Nanoboard 3000 with the specific angle of teaching a total FPGA newbie how to get started with this board.A friend of mine is a senior in MIT's Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-25034649534896347732009-08-24T08:39:00.001-07:002009-08-24T09:26:59.559-07:00Intel Buying EveryoneIn the past month, Intel has purchased RapidMind and Cilk. I've talked about Cilk on this blog a while ago (post has comments from one of their founders).This was a good move for Intel. It is probably an attempt to make the eventual release of Larrabee less painful for developers. This will help put Intel in the leader seat for parallel programming platforms.What will this mean for CUDA and Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-35651444021212977382009-08-19T10:31:00.000-07:002009-08-19T13:45:46.300-07:00Power vs SpeedIt would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years - John von Neumann, 1949The design goals in parallel computing differ between the embedded multicore market and the high performance computing market. On the one hand, more cores can do Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-71672268898228798272009-07-23T23:14:00.000-07:002009-07-24T13:00:26.881-07:00Demand for EDA SaaSIt's been a while, I promise I'll post more when I'm finished with my job.The blogs have been buzzing about EDA SaaS ("Electronic Design Automation Software as a Service"). In one of my previous posts on the subject, I argued that the complexity of system design is growing faster than the ability of a reasonable desktop computer and that this will create demand for hosted EDA tools. I also arguedAmirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27540231.post-92138682420351071872009-03-11T14:10:00.000-07:002009-03-11T13:33:54.285-07:00Emulation is the Sincerest Form of FlatteryI apologize for not writing in a while. I have been running the DEC XXDP diagnostic tests on my PDP-11/70 emulator. I just finished making integer divide compatible --- not just to spec, but compatible with all the edge cases of the 11/70 model. I'm impressed with how they designed and debugged this sort of thing back in the 60's and 70's. Each bug probably took about a day to diagnose with Amirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05436827810418004991noreply@blogger.com1