This week we had a guest speaker come to talk to the class about open source in relation to databases. Sadly, I missed this talk because I am sick, so I am going to read some other blog posts that will hopefully shed some light on what Professor Engel talked about in class.

Because I do not know yet what she talked about, I want to write about this cool open source project I learned about this week.

RISC-V is a very interesting open source project that focuses on utilizing hardware, specifically it is an hardware instruction set architecture that microprocessors can utilize. This means that it is an instruction set which can be modified slightly or greatly, or not at all depenending on the uses that the user has for the cpu running the instructions. For example if lots of matrix multiplications are necessary for machine learning or other specific calculations are going to be necessary, changes can be made to utilize the microprocessor better without and legal issues. This is very cool in my opinion, but the coolest part is the educational positives of having an open source ISA. Due to legal issues, most university microprocessor architecture classes are forced to use toy architecture which oversimplify or misrepresent real architectures. Being able to modify, and redistribute this ISA is a godsend for this issue, as students are now able to work on a real system without any oversight of legality. This will have huge ramifications for the open source world as well.

While it is not widespread in commercial use yet, this specific ISA is being used to teach microprocessor architecture to students throughout the country, and hopefully once this generation of fresh computer scientists join research/the workforce, they will use this open source platform and expand RISC-V for both personal, and commercial uses.