Ouessant

h1. What is Ouessant?

Ouessant is an island in the west of France, located near Molène. Both islands are part of Ponant Islands archipelago.

h1. Ouessant: where does it come from

Ouessant project was initiated in early 2015 at Télécom Bretagne, a French engineering school. Three students in their last year were working on a school project proposed by two teachers and a PhD student. The aim of this project was double: experiment with Gaisler's LEON processor, and implement a coprocessor integration approach called Molen. Molen is an approach proposed by the Computer Science Lab of Delft University, in The Netherlands. Briefly described, the Molen approach defines a limited set of instructions which can be used to control an Hardware Coprocessor. The resulting "processor", called "Molen Polymorphic Processor", is then integrated with the processor, and can speed up operations transparently from the processor point of view. However, while several articles exist on the Molen approach, no implementation can be found. 

When we started to design their implementation of the Molen, we ran into several problems. While Molen was supposedly processor agnostic, it seems difficult to do so with the proposed architecture. Several features had not been implemented and described in the articles. And finally, the close interaction between the CPU and the Molen did not allow for parallelism. Other problems were listed, which led us to deeply modify the architecture, even if we kept the microprocessor approach. 

Two of the students took part to this design and development, the third one focused on other unrelated tasks. When the first results were obtained, we decided to develop the architecture further. We had to choose a name, and Ouessant seemed a logical choice.

h1. Ouessant approach 

The Ouessant approach is based on the Molen approach, but it tackles several points differently from the original approach.

h1. The Team 

Current active members:

 * "Pierre-Henri Horrein":http://perso.telecom-bretagne.eu/phhorrein [ph.horrein@telecom-bretagne.eu] 

 * Matthieu Arzel [matthieu.arzel@telecom-bretagne.eu]

 * André Lalevée [andre.lalevee@telecom-bretagne.eu]

Occasional members

 * Philip-Dylan Gleonec [philip-dylan.gleonec@telecom-bretagne.eu]

 * Erwan Libessart [erwan.libessart@telecom-bretagne.eu]

 * Benoît Porteboeuf