Us ICCLab folk are always interested in new ideas, particularly those that could have a profound impact on computing in general and cloud computing in particular. Consequently, we couldn’t miss out on the opportunity of attending ORConf – a conference loosely centred around open source silicon – which was free and (more or less) just down the road at CERN.

The conference itself was superb, comprising of an excellent mix of hobbyists/open source advocates, industry folks and academics with some of the people wearing more than one hat. There was also quite a diverse set of backgrounds ranging from ASIC designers to FPGA guys to compiler designers to some simpler software types. The quality of people was overwhelming with excellent guys from high profile organizations such as Intel, Google, Qualcomm, nvidia, Uni Cambridge, EPFL, ETH and Berkeley (although many of the industry folk were not specifically representing their employers).

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