Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is one of the most powerful tools in my arsenal. Simply put, it lets you control another computer remotely. It is fast, nimble and intuitive to use. I often find myself “revealing” this tool to coworkers and friends in order to make their life easier by helping them remotely connect to their home computer, not to go to the lab for every little click and even work from home.

At Xilinx, I developed and ran the Rosetta experiment. This experiment measured the frequency of FPGA configuration bit flips caused by ambient radiation. These occurances are called “Single Event Upsets,” or SEUs. The experiments ran remotely 24×7 at various elevations: San Jose (California,) Albuquerque (New Mexico,) Mauna Kea (Hawaii) and Barcroft Station (California) which is part of the White Mountain Research Station near Bishop. These many experiments were all in the network (some using VPN) and were controlled using VNC from my cubicle desktop; I was able to do almost anything from my cube (unless the network was down.) I designed the experiments to be nearly autonomous, emailing me when any problem occurred and keeping meticulous logs for analysis. This was a great project to develop.

Our group’s lab was a 5 minute walk away, and often it became tedious to do it hundreds of times a day. At the beginning of an experiment I installed VNC on the lab machine and was able to run or monitor most of the activity from my desktop once the experiment was setup. Adding the powerful capabilities of ChipScope on-chip logic analyzer made it even better.

Many versions of VNC are available, such as RealVNC, TightVNC, UltraVNC and more. The basic editions are free.

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