Dear Bernhard, Alexandre and all, Thanks Bernhard for pointing to this. I would have missed it completely… The German BMBF (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung = German Federal Ministry of Research and Technology) started this competition for German universities and public research centers. It is targeted at increasing energy efficiency for AI systems. The aim is to increase Germany’s competencies and competitiveness in this sector which is deemed to be a future key technology with the potential of disruptive innovation. It is clear that the energy efficiency is less determined by what programming language is used and what virtual machine is run on some standard hardware. The real gains are rather found in maybe novel algorithms, surely in novel hardware architectures and implementations. Indeed, when you look at the details of the competition (link below) that is exactly the case: any proposed solutions submitted to the competition must belong to one of three categories: FPGAs, ASIC s in 130 nm technology or ASICs in FDSOI technology. Close hardware/software co-design is explicitly requested. Not eligible are solutions that only optimize software components or use commercially available hardware unchanged. Does this mean that this competition is of no interest to ambitious Smalltalkers? No! In contrary. With Smalltalk being a perfect interactive modeling, exploration and simulation tool we Smalltalkers can help our competition team to build, explore and optimize their ideas before and while building them in hardware. Also hardware is nothing without software. Smalltalk is in my view best positioned to execute the desired co-design in a co-evolutionary way. Certainly we could demonstrate modern “agile” engineering approaches as a side-means to increase competitiveness. Everyone interested should take a look at the competition here: https://www.bmbf.de/foerderungen/bekanntmachung-2371.html (in German, obviously). Please also forward to all people who might be interested. Cheers Helge Helge Nowak Cincom Smalltalk Technical Account Manager [http://internal.cincom.com/signature/logo.png]<http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/> Cincom Systems GmbH & Co. oHG Humboldtstraße 3 60318 Frankfurt am Main GERMANY office mobile website email +49 89 89 66 44 94 +49 172 74 00 402 http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com hnowak@cincom.com A standpoint is an intellectual horizon of radius zero. -- Albert Einstein Geschäftsführer/Managing Directors: Thomas M. Nies, Donald E. Vick oHG mit Sitz/based in Frankfurt am Main (Amtsgericht Frankfurt am Main HRA 50297) Pers. haftender Gesellschafter/Partner liable to unlimited extent: Cincom Systems Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH (Amtsgericht Königstein/Ts. HRB 5069) --- CONFIDENTIALITY STATEMENT --- This e-mail transmission contains information that is intended to be privileged and confidential. It is intended only for the addressee named above. If you receive this e-mail in error, please do not read, copy or disseminate it in any manner. If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this information is prohibited, please reply to the message immediately by informing the sender that the message was misdirected. After replying, please erase it from your computer system. Your assistance in correcting this error is appreciated. Von: Alexandre Bergel [mailto:alexandre.bergel@me.com] Gesendet: Freitag, 12. April 2019 19:08 An: Bernhard Höfner <bernhard.hoefner@web.de> Cc: VisualWorks mailing list list <vwnc@cs.uiuc.edu>; pharo-dev@lists.pharo.org Betreff: Re: [vwnc] most energy efficient AI system - challenge of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research BMBF Hello, We conducted some experiment in characterizing virtual machine from an energetic point of view. Results are not public yet. This is just to say this is a topic that I am interested in. Cheers, Alexandre On Apr 11, 2019, at 5:29 PM, Bernhard Höfner <bernhard.hoefner@web.de<mailto:bernhard.hoefner@web.de>> wrote: Hello Group, the German BMBF advertised a reward for the most energy efficient AI system, see: https://www.bmbf.de/de/mehr-ki-erfordert-weniger-energie-8156.html (in German), and I am wondering what is the position of Smalltalk in that field or what it could be. From the early 90th I know that much of the pretended slowness of Smalltalk was absorbed by the more efficient programs due to better analysis, concepts, design and development tools (and maybe developers ? ). Best Regards, Bernhard
