prpl Foundation Welcomes New Higher Education Members PUCRS and UCSC

Open source group continues to expand as it addresses
interoperability and security from device to datacenter

SANTA CLARA, CA, Nov. 5, 2015 - The prpl Foundation, an open-source non-profit foundation focused on enabling next-generation datacenter-to-device portable software and virtualized architectures, today announced the addition of two new higher education members -- Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), and the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC).

"We're excited to have PUCRS and UCSC join the prpl Foundation," said Art Swift, president of the prpl Foundation. "When we look at the range of educational institutions, companies, and individuals that are joining the prpl Foundation, it's clear that we're on point by supporting the development of next-generation virtualized architectures that promote efficiency, portability and compatibility."

Swift added, "As prpl continues to grow its membership, academic institutions provide a source of innovation and expertise to the Foundation's engineering working groups. They join other prpl members worldwide who are working together to solve important challenges such as interoperability and security across an increasingly connected world."

Founded in 1948 and based in Porto Alegre, Brazil, PUCRS is a private, non-profit Catholic university.

According to Dr. Fabiano Hessel, PUCRS project advisor, the university's Hellfire framework has a number of Foundation synergies of interest to members. The framework designs, simulates and debugs embedded systems; the project's design flow is support by several tools and modules.

From a platform perspective, noted Hessel, designers can add up to 128 MIPS-based processors to the system, configure each one, and by using the Hellfire OS API, develop parallel embedded apps that can exchange data and migrate tasks.

Additionally, the framework implements a lightweight virtualization layer called Hellfire Hypervisor that supports hardware virtualization on the M5150 processor. The hypervisor can virtualize the Hellfire OS, Linux and bare-metal applications on the MIPS SEAD-3 platform board.

Established in 1965, UCSC is one of 10 campuses of the University of California system. The public university is located in Santa Cruz, about 75 miles south of San Francisco.

According to Jose Renau, associate professor of computer engineering at UCSC, the university's Micro Architecture Santa Cruz Group (MASC) has a long and distinguished track record in developing architectural simulators. The latest version --ESESC – a fast multicore simulator - is available on GitHub (https://github.com/masc-ucsc/esesc) and includes several improvements and support for the MIPS64 R6 architecture.

"Our security working group is very interested in the potential use of the Hellfire framework for isolation and security in small footprint, resource constrained IoT systems," added Swift. "And the ESESC MIPS simulator has already been made available to the prpl open source community via the prpl.works community site."

About prpl

prpl (pronounced "Purple"), is an open-source, community-driven, collaborative, non-profit foundation targeting and supporting the MIPS architecture – and open to others – with a focus on enabling next-generation datacenter-to-device portable software and virtualized architectures. prpl represents leaders in the technology industry investing in innovation in efficiency, portability and compatibility for the good of a broad community of developers, businesses and consumers. Initial domains targeted by prpl include datacenter, networking & storage, connected consumer and embedded/IoT. The Foundation also recently launched prpl.Works, which highlights the open source work of prpl and its members. See: www.prplfoundation.org.

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