VMW Research Group News
The Weaver Computer Engineering Research Group
Recent News
- 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!
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