== SPO600 in Fall 2014 Winter 2015 ==

In SPO600, you'll be working directly with open source communities to port softwareA new computer architecture has appeared: 64-bit ARM systems (also known as "ARM64" or "AArch64"). This semester, we'll be collaborating with a project set While AArch64 is showing up by Jon "Maddog" Hall in cell phones and [http://linarotablets, it is also poised to pounce on the datacentre.org Linaro] Most of the work of porting core software to port AArch64 has been completed, and optimize software which doesn't currently at this point, just about everything that runs on x86_64 Linux systems will run on 64-bit ARM (aarch64) computersan AArch64 systems. This project However, the x86_64 architecture has identified been around 1400 for many years, and software packages has been well-optimized to work on that need work. (As a bonusarchitecture; but AArch64 is new, completed projects and it may be eligible for recognition possible to get better performance with additional tuning and possibly prizes from Linaro)optimization.

In Winter 2015, the SPO600 course will be focused on optimizing the "LAMP" stack -- Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Python/PHP/Perl (or equivalents!) -- to make it run as efficiently as possible on AArch64 systems. We will build, benchmark, and profile the LAMP stack on x86_64 systems, then do the same on AArch64, and identify areas for improvement. Then we'll experiment with compiler options, algorithm changes, and platform-specific code to optimize the performance. Note that, unlike some other project-based courses, the results of the projects done in SPO600 will be incorporated into the actual "upstream" open source projectssoftware, and have a real impact on other people. For this reason, projects must be completed in collaboration with the relevant open source communities, using relevant [[SPO600 Communication Tools|communication tools]]. Work performed in this course will be licensed using the relevant open source licenses used by the associated community.