The 2006 Embedded and Communications Education Summit was held in Hudson, MA Wednesday Oct. 11- Thursday, Oct. 12. The summit is an annual event hosted by Intel's Infrastructure Processor Division that brings professors and scholars together with Intel architects to discuss current research and new applications based on embedded Intel architecture. There were approximately 45 attendees including representatives from 19 member universities in the US, Canada, India and China. Additional attendance by Intel architects, engineers and university program staff made this year’s event the largest to date.

“I look forward to the summit each year as a chance to interact socially and professionally with colleagues from colleagues from Intel on the east coast,” said Patrick Crowley, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering; Washington University in St. Louis.

“The feedback from the Chinese faculties is very positive, they expressed that it’s one of most impressive summits they’ve ever participated in,” said Jolly Wang, who directs the China Intel Education program. “China is definitely one of main market for embedded and communication.”

Intel Fellow Tryggve Fossum delivered Wednesday’s keynote address, “Technology Trends Impacting Future CPU Development.” Tryggve shared insights into existing technology trends and how Intel plans to maintain leadership in the semiconductor industry. 

Wednesday's university presentations were given by Tilman Wolf from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Patrick Crowley from Washington University in St. Louis; and M. Singaperumal from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Tilman's presentation, "Online Anomaly Detection using the IXP2400" focused on network processing solutions that would be valuable to service providers, data centers and researchers. Patrick's presentation, "Network I/O Acceleration in Heterogeneous Multicore Processors" focused on using network processors like CMP architecture to accelerate network processing while preserving socket interface. Prof. Singaperumal covered his program's research in designing a distributed networked robotic system based on the Intel IXP4xx X-Scale Network Processor.

Representatives from Netronome Systems, Inc., an IA based hardware manufacturer were also in attendance. Mike Benson, Netronome VP of Engineering presented on how professors and scholars can leverage the company’s NFE-i8000 PCI-express platform in their research.

Thursday’s keynote address, “Content Processing for IA Plaforms” was presented by Senior Principal Engineer and Director of IPD Architecture Pranav Mehta. Pranav revealed how complementing IA with IXA technology can enable next generation packet processing solutions.

Thursday's university presentations were delivered by Peter Usunganan from Tsinghua University and Himanshu Raj from Georgia Institute of Technology. Peter's presentation, "An XML-based System Architecture for IXA/IA Intercommunication" addressed the need to standardize on data formats and communication methods as network infrastructures become larger and more diverse. Himanshu's presentation, "Design of a Self-Virtualizing Network Interface with the IXP2400 NP" described how devices such as a NIC could virtualize themselves with minimal support form a hypervisor and that can be used directly from guest domains.

Peter Usunganan Tsinghua University

Mike Benson Netronome Systems

Himanshu Raj Georgia Institute of Technology

Select Intel engineers and architects also presented on topics including Data Compression, Pattern Matching, CoProcessor Acceleration, and embedded IA’s contribution to the Intel VIIV platform.

A special thank you goes out to all who attended and contributed to a very successful event. We are looking to seeing even more of our members at the 2007 summit!