Why Assembly Language?
Robert G. Plantz, Sonoma State University (Emeritus)
10/15/2015
I believe that you “should avoid writing in assembly language except when absolutely necessary,” but that every programmer should understand assembly language. Higher-level languages provide a machine-independent means to program a computer that is generally easier for a human to read and write, but ultimately the program must control the specific hardware at the assembly language level. I will talk about why I think that knowing assembly language helps you to be a better programmer.
Contributing To Open Source: What’s In It For Me?
Deepa Karnad Dhurka, Sr. Software Engineer, PayPal
10/22/2015
Open source software has come a long way. Commercial products like server operating systems are built around open source projects and in the least, the Linux kernel. Commercial infrastructure and software deployments - notably in Cloud - are run on a mind boggling number of open source projects. Every single day new projects are announced or released. What does this mean for the software developer? What are the opportunities and how can an engineer leverage them to distinguish and catapult her or his career? Consumed by these questions, I led a CodeChix team of women engineers into an adventure to explore this space. In June 2013, we started work on a software library written entirely in C, for SDN network connectivity. In Nov 2013, CodeChix released OFconnect as open source:https://github.com/CodeChix-OpenSource/OFconnect. In this talk, I will share the story of this CodeChix project, including a technical dive into the design and the opportunities that unfolded after its release. With this, I hope to showcase the power of affinity groups, the importance of ‘making’ and most importantly, the value in contributing to open source.
What Every Cs Student Should Know About Romania
Allan B. Cruse, University of San Francisco
10/29/2015
College students in the U.S. have not been kept informed of the extent to which our familiar high-tech firms, like Microsoft and Adobe, have established vigorous corporate footholds in former communist nations of Eastern Europe, such as Romania, in order to take advantage of the youth, energy, creativity, and ambition, now unleashed in that previously suppressed part of the world. But utilizing the internet, we can make a "virtual visit" to meet people, and glimpse current projects, from the other side of our globe.
Enter The Dragon: A Peek Inside Of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Memory Controller Team
Korey Sewell, Qualcomm
11/05/2015
The global proliferation of mobile computing devices has reemphasized computer architectures that integrate a variety of processing cores and memories. Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor, featured in products such as Samsung Galaxy phones and Amazon Kindle tablets, have been at the forefront of the mobile computing movement due to it's ability to successfully tradeoff performance, power, and quality-of-service (QoS) within one chip. A key part of the Snapdragon's integration ability is found in the memory controller where concurrent requests are managed across processing elements like CPUs, GPUs, and modems. This talk will provide an overview of the challenges faced by the Snapdragon memory controller team and discuss how those challenges impact future architectures.
Understanding Parallel Computing Through Visualization
Kate Isaacs, University of California, Davis
11/12/2015
Parallel simulation is used for discovery across scientific domains including climate, medicine, and energy. Understanding the behavior of these massively parallel applications and the systems on which they run is essential for increasing the scale and fidelity of our science. Visualization can provide insight into these complex software and systems. In this talk, I will show how information visualization is used to explore and improve parallel applications.