The Weaver Computer Engineering Research Group

• 2 August 2025
  Prof. Weaver won the "Sur Prize" in the 2024 International Obfuscated C Code Competition
  
  
• 9 May 2025
  Prof. Weaver appeared on a panel at the PAX East gaming conference: The Apple II Origins of Today's Games
  
  
• 29 April 2025
  Congratulations to G. White for sucessfully defending his Masters thesis: "A Raspberry-Pi Operating System for Use in Distributed Systems"
  
  
• 18 November 2024
  Prof. Weaver attended the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing 2024 conference in Atlanta Georgia.
  He presented the paper "Performance Measurement on Heterogeneous Processors with PAPI" at the ProTools 2024: Workshop on Programming and Performance Visualisation Tools. (for more info see here: Hybrid Processor Research).
  He also helped present the Poster "Scalable Performance and Accuracy Analysis for Distributed and Extreme-Scale Systems" at the poster session.
  
  
• 16 November 2024
  Prof. Weaver's Apple II demo "Driven" won 1st place in the combined demo category at the Deomspash Demoparty held at Carnegie Mellon University.
  
  
• 12 March 2024
  Prof. Weaver built a new Raspberry Pi Cluster for use in ECE574 and other projects.
  
  
• 24 February 2024
  Two of Prof. Weaver's Atari 2600 games were nominated for awards in the 6th Annual Atari Homebrew Award competition.
  
  
• 13 February 2024
  Prof. Weaver had numerous demos place highly as the recent Lovebyte 2024 size-coding demoparty, including 1st place in the 32byte oldschool competition with "Spiralling Shape" for Apple II. He also came in third in the old-school "byte-athlon" competition.
  
  
• 4 November 2023
  Prof. Weaver's "Apple II Reality" demo finished 1st in the retro-demo category at the Demosplash computer art/music event. It's a remake of the famous 1993 DOS demo "Second Reality" but for the much older Apple II platform. video.
  
  
• 15 September 2023
  We received a grant from the NSF: NSF-CSSI-Frameworks, Scalable Performance and Accuracy analysis for Distributed and Extreme-scale systems (SPADE). This work involves the PAPI performance library and will be done in conjunction with researchers at the University of Tennessee and the University of Texas El Paso.
  
  
• 7 September 2023
  Prof. Weaver's "demake" work was featured on the UMaine News website.
  
  It was also featured on the Ars Technica website.
  
  
• 19 November 2022
  Prof. Weaver presented a talk: All you have is a 20-bit Framebuffer: Games and Demakes for the Atari 2600/VCS at the Demosplash Demoparty at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (virtually). His entries also won 2nd place in the retro demo category and 1st place in the 1k category.
  
  
• 18 November 2022
  Prof. Weaver presented the paper Improving HPC Security with Targeted Syscall Fuzzing (remotely) at the First Annual Workshop on Cyber Security in High Performance Computing (S-HPC'22) .
  
  Find more info on the perf_fuzzer here.
  
  
• 27 May 2022
  Prof. Weaver gave the lunch talk (remotely) at the University of Tennessee's Innovative Computing Lab (ICL).
  
  
• 12 November 2021
  Prof. Weaver presented a talk: Peasant's Quest for the Apple II: Taking a 2000s Flash Game Back to the 1980s at the Demosplash Demoparty at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (virtually). His entries also won 1st place in the Combined demo category and 2nd place in the 1k category.
  
  
• 23 July 2021
  Prof. Weaver presented a talk: Tiny Programs for the Apple II at the Kansasfest Conference in Kansas City, Missouri (virtually)
  
  
• 17 July 2021
  Prof. Weaver presented a talk: An Apple II Myst Demake at the Mysterium Conference in Washington DC (virtually)
  
  
• 13 May 2021
  Prof. Weaver had two Apple II entries to the Outline Online Demoparty win second place.
  
  
• 15 April 2021
  The Weaver research group received a donation from Ampere of some 64-bit ARM servers which we will use for performance counter and other HPC research.
  
  
  
  
• 21 March 2021
  Prof. Weaver presented a talk: Sizecoding on the Apple II At the Lovebyte Demoparty in the Netherlands (virtually).
  
  
• 20 November 2020
  Prof. Weaver presented a talk: Fast Loading Times on the Apple II: Pushing the Limits of the Disk ][ at the Demosplash Demoparty, held at Carnegie Mellon (virtually). His Applesoft Basic Bot Demo won 1st place in the Retro Demo category and his Apple II Myst Ad won 1st place in the ANSI art category.
  
  
• 24 July 2020
  Prof. Weaver presented a talk: Myst Demake for the Apple II at KansasFest, Kansas City, MO (virtual).
  
  
• 28 March 2020
  Prof. Weaver's article on Apple II Game Demakes was the cover story in the Spring issue of Juiced.GS Magazine
  
  
• 22 November 2019
  Come see Prof. Weaver's ECE Grad seminar lecture Playing Music on Tiny Computers - Decoding PT3 Tracker files on the Apple II and Raspberry Pi (flier here).
  
  
• 9 November 2019
  Prof. Weaver presented a talk: Writing a PT3 Vortex Tracker Player for the Apple II at the Demosplash Demoparty, held at Carnegie Mellon. His Raspberry Pi Demo won 2nd place in the Modern Demo category, and his Apple II Demo won 3rd place in the Retro Demo category.
  
  
• 5 April 2019
  Computer pioneer and UMaine alumnus Chuck Peddle (who led the team who developed the 6502 processor, among other things) visited the department. Professor Weaver set up a display of vintage hardware that used the 6502 chip. See here for some more on the visit.
  
  
• 16 November 2018
  Pascal Francis-Mezger presented our paper Advanced Event Sampling Support for PAPI at the Workshop on Extreme-Scale Programming Tools (ESPT) held at the Supercomputing conference.
  
  
• 3 November 2018
  Prof. Weaver presented a talk: Demo Programming on the Apple II at the Demosplash Demoparty, held at Carnegie Mellon. He also entered a demo which won first place in the Retro category.
  
  
• 26 October 2018
  Come see Prof. Weaver's ECE Grad seminar lecture Apple ][ Demo Programming -- Retro-computing and the Demoscene (flier here).
  
  
• 4 October 2018
  Pascal Francis-Mezger presented our paper A Raspberry Pi Operating System for Exploring Advanced Memory System Concepts (more here) at MEMSYS 2018. The paper won the ``Chair's Choice'' award.
  
  
• 19 July 2018
  Prof. Weaver presented a talk, Apple II Programming Adventures, at the Kansasfest2018 conference. His project won second place at the Hackfest competition.
  
  
• 21 June 2018
  Prof. Weaver's paper An 8 Kilobyte Mode 7 Demo for the Apple II was published in Issue 0x18 of the PoC||GTFO journal.
  
  
• April 2018
  Congratulations to Yanxiang Mao for successfully defending his Masters Thesis: Detailed Power Measurement with ARM Embedded Boards
  
  
• 19 March 2018
  Professor Weaver was granted tenure!
  
  
• 30 November 2017
  Congratulations to Yan Liu for successfully defending her Masters Thesis, "Optimizing PAPI for Low-Overhead Counter Measurement"
  
  
• 15 November 2017
  Prof. Weaver and Yan Liu had multiple works presented at the Supercomputing Conference (SC'17) in Denver, Colorado.
  
  Enhancing PAPI with Low-Overhead rdpmc Reads was presented at the Extreme-Scale Programming Tools (ESPT) Workshop. See more info on our presentation here
  
  We also had a poster, Recent Advances in the Performance API (PAPI) in conjunction with the Innovative Computing Lab at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. This poster was nominated for the Best Poster award.
  
  Here's a picture of Prof. Weaver helping to present the poster, you can watch the full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY_l8TrNmWU
  
  
  
• 1 November 2017
  The Weaver Group Computer Engineering Lab has moved to a new, freshly renovated, lab in 204 Barrows Hall.
  
  
  
• 3 November 2016
  Prof. Weaver presented his work on the perf_fuzzer at the 2016 Linux Plumbers Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A writeup of the talk can be found at LWN: A trio of Fuzzers.
  
  
• 7 October 2016
  Prof. Weaver gave an invited talk at the University of Maryland, College Park: The Challenge of Measuring Power on Modern Computing Systems.
  
  
• 6 October 2016
  Prof. Weaver presented the group's work on DRAM RAPL Validation at the 2016 MEMSYS conference. His presentation won the award for Most Gratuiutous Use of an Umlaut in a Scientific Presentation
  
  
• 23 September 2016
  Our group's paper on our Raspberry Pi Cluster was published in the MDPI Electronics Journal Special Issue on Raspberry Pi Computing.
  
  
• 13 September 2016
  One of Prof. Weaver's projects was featured on the Official Raspberry Pi Foundation Blog
  
  
• 27 April 2016
  CUGR student Spencer Desrochers presented a poster on his work at the 2016 UMaine Graduate and Undergraduate Student Research Symposium
  
  
• 18 April 2016
  CUGR student Spencer Desrochers and his work at the Weaver Lab was featured in an interview at the Maine Journal
  
  
• 17 November 2015
  Prof. Weaver presented Initial Validation of DRAM and GPU RAPL Power Measurements at the 2015 Extreme Scale Programming Tools Workshop at SC'15
  
  
• 13 November 2015
  Prof. Weaver received the UMaine Department of Engineering's Early Career Teaching Award
  
  
• 27 August 2015
  Our group was awarded a grant by the NSF in conjuction with a group at the University of Tennessee to enhance the PAPI performance measurement library for extreme-scale systems.
  
  
• 20 June 2015
  Congratulations to Chad Paradis for successfully defending his Masters Thesis!