Last week, I attended my fourth System, Software, SoC and Silicon Degug conference (S4D) in a row. I think the silicon part is getting less attention these days, most of the papers were on how to debug software. Often with the help of hardware, and with an angle to how software runs in SoCs and systems. I presented a paper reviewing the technology and history of reverse debugging, which went down pretty well.
Category Archives: Conferences
SiCS Multicore Day 2012
The 2012 edition of the SiCS Multicore Day was fun, like they have always been in the past. I missed it in 2010 and 2011, but could make it back this year. It was interesting to see that the points where keynote speakers disagreed was similar to previous years, albeit with some new twists. There was also a trend in architecture, moving crypto operations into the core processor ISA, that indicates another angle on the hardware accelerator space.
Paper & Talk at S4D 2012: Reverse Debug
I am going to the S4D conference for the third year in a row. This year, I have a paper on reverse debugging, reviewing the technology, products, and history of the idea. I will probably write a longer blog post after the conference, interesting things tend to come up.
Keynote on System-Level Debug
I have now posted the slides from my keynote talk at the S4D 2011 conference to the presentations list on my regular home page. The topic of that talk was “System-Level Debug”, something which has started to interest me in recent years.
Memory Models: x86 is TSO, TSO is Good
By chance, I got to attend a day at the UPMARC Summer School with a very enjoyable talk by Francesco Zappa Nardelli from INRIA. He described his work (along with others) on understanding and modeling multiprocessor memory models. It is a very complex subject, but he managed to explain it very well.
S4D 2011 Submission Time
The submissions for S4D 2011 is now open, at http://www.ecsi.org/s4d/submissions. I have been to S4D for two years now, and I find it one of the most interesting conferences around. It is a nice mix of hardware design and software tools, all directed at the fundamental problem of how to debug a digital system. To me, it is the “debug conference” par excellence.
If you have something interesting to submit, please do. I won’t have time myself to write something for this year, unfortunately.
S4D 2010
Looks like S4D (and the co-located FDL) is becoming my most regular conference. S4D is a very interactive event. With some 20 to 30 people in the room, many of them also presenting papers at the conference, it turns into a workshop at its best. There were plenty of discussion going on during sessions and the breaks, and I think we all got new insights and ideas.
S4D Paper on Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints
I have a paper about “Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints” to be presented at the S4D (System, Software, SoC and Silicon Debug) conference in Southampton, UK, on September 15 and 16, 2010. The core concept presented is to leverage Simics checkpointing to capture and move a bug from the bug reporter to the responsible developer. It is a fairly simple idea, but getting it to work efficiently does require that some things are done right. See the longer Wind River blog posting about this topic for a few more details.
MCC 2009 Presentations Online
The presentations from the 2009 Swedish Workshop on Multicore Computing (MCC 2009) are now online at the program page for the workshop. Let me add some comments on the workshop per se.
How (Not) To Present Parallel Programming Results
SCDSource ran a short but good article summarizing a few DAC talks that I would liked to attend. it mostly about the experience of long-term parallel programming research David Bailey in presenting results in the field…
The S4D Debug Conference
An unplanned and unexpected bonus with my trip to the FDL 2009 conference was the co-located S4D conference. S4D means System, Software, SoC and Silicon Debug, and is a conference that has grown out of some recent workshops on the topic of debugging, as seen from the perspective of hardware designers (mostly). S4D was part of the same package as FDL and DASIP, entrance to one conference got you into the other two too. As I did not know about S4D until quite late in the process, this was a great opportunity for me to look at what they were doing.
FDL Impressions
This is end of the second day of FDL 2009, and it is proving to be quite an interesting experience. The location is very bad, apart from the weather (coming from a Swedish Fall where temperatures are dropping towards 10 C, to a sunny 27 C is quite nice). But Sophia Antipolis is just a tech park with some hotels, and you cannot get anywhere interesting or civilized without a car. No shops, no restaurants except for hotels, and so sidewalks in parts.
But the conference is good enough to be worth the bodily discomforts. And I did find a nice Parcours Sportif for the morning run, as well as a nice breakfast buffet at the Mercure Hotel.
SiCS Multicore Day 2009
Last Friday, I attended this year’s edition of the SiCS Multicore Day. It was smaller in scale than last year, being only a single day rather than two days. The program was very high quality nevertheless, with keynote talks from Hazim Shafi of Microsoft, Richard Kaufmann of HP, and Anders Landin of Sun. Additionally, there was a mid-day three-track session with research and industry talks from the Swedish multicore community. Read More →
Øredev 2009: Meanwhile, Parallel
Øredev is the premier software development conference in Sweden and Europe (they claim). I gave some presentations there in 2006 and 2007, but since then they have dropped the general embedded software development track and just focused on programming for mobile phones. Most of the material is “general IT”. If you are doing software development on the desktop or for servers, it is a good place to go to learn new things from the general world of computing.
Checkpointing in SystemC @ FDL
Along with Marius Monton and Mark Burton of GreenSocs, I will be presenting a paper on checkpointing and SystemC at the FDL, Forum on Specification and Design Languages, in late September 2009.
The paper will explain how we did Simics-style checkpointing in SystemC, using the GreenSocs GreenConfig mechanisms to obtain an approximation for the Simics attribute system.
Conquering Software with Software High-Level Synthesis
This post is a follow-up to the DAC panel discussion we had yesterday on how to conquer hardware-dependent software development. Most of the panel turned into a very useful dialogue on virtual platforms and how they are created, not really discussing how to actually use them for easing low-level software development. We did get to software eventually though, and had another good dialogue with the audience. Thanks to the tough DAC participants who held out to the end of the last panel of the last day!
As is often the case, after the panel has ended, I realized several good and important points that I never got around to making… and of those one struck me as worthy of a blog post in its own right.It is the issue of how high-level synthesis can help software design.
The TLM DAC
The past few days here at DAC, a big theme has been transaction level modeling (TLM).
TLM is often considered to be SystemC TLM-2.0. Most of the statements from the EDA companies are to the effect that SystemC TLM-2.0 solves the problem of combining models from different sources. Scratching the surface of this happy picture, it is clear that it is not that simple…
DAC Traffic Report
I finally got to spend some time at the DAC show floor on Thursday (which was day four and the last day of the show). It was very quiet, not many people around, and many booths also running with low staffing. However, unlike the Embedded Systems Conference, this last day was not indicative of the show overall.
DAC 2009 Panel and Paper
The 46th Design Automation Conference (DAC) is coming up in San Francisco in the US, last week of July. For me, this will be the first time I ever go to DAC. I have been to a couple of Design Automation and Test Europe (DATE) conferences before, but DAC is supposedly even bigger as an event for the EDA and related communities. I have the honor to be on a panel this year, as well as co-authoring a paper on software validation.
Notes from the IP 08 Panel
Now I am home again, and some days have passed since the IP 08 panel discussion about software and hardware virtual platforms. This was an EDA hardware-oriented conference, and thus the audience was quite interested in how to tie things to hardware design. Any case, it was a fun panel, and Pierre Bricaud did a good job of moderating and keeping things interesting.
IP08 Panel on Virtual Platforms and Software
On Wednesday this week, I will take part of a panel discussion about virtual platforms and using them for software development, at the IP08 conference in Grenoble in France. We have a good crew, including Markus Willems from Synopsys, Peter Flake from ELDA, and Loic le Toumelin from TI (who I have not met before).
SiCS Multicore Days: The Debate Points
It is a week ago now, and sometimes it is good to let impressions sink in and get processed a bit before writing about an event like the SiCS Multicore Days. Overall, the event was serious fun, and I found the speakers very insightful and the panel discussion and audience questions added even more information.
What is Efficiency when Cores are Free?
More from the SiCS multicore days 2008.
There were some interesting comments on how to define efficiency in a world of plentiful cores. The theme from my previous blog post called “Real-Time Control when Cores Become Free” came up several times during the talks, panels, and discussions. It seems that this year, everybody agreed that we are heading to 100s or 1000s of “self-respecting” cores on a single chip, and that with that kind of core count, it is not too important to keep them all busy at all times at any cost. As I stated earlier, cores and instructions are now free, while other aspects are limiting, turning the classic optimization imperatives of computing on its head. Operating systems will become more about space-sharing than time-sharing, and it might make sense to dedicate processing cores to the sole job of impersonating peripheral units or doing polling work. Operating systems can also be simplified when the job of time-sharing is taken away, even if communications and resource management might well bring in some new interesting issues.
So, what is efficiency in this kind of environment?
The JVM as Universal Parallel Glue?
The two days of the SiCS Multicore Days is now over, and it was a really fun event this year too. I will be writing a few things inspired by the event, and here is the first.
Kunle Olukotun‘s presentation on the work of the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism lab included a diagram where they showed a range of domain-specific languages (DSL) being compiled to a universal implementation language. That language is currently Scala, and in the end all applications end up being compiled into Scala byte codes, which are then optimized and dynamically reoptimized and executed on a particular hardware system based on the properties of that system. Fundamentally, the problem of creating and compiling a DSL, and combining program segments written in different DSLs, is solved by interposing a layer of indirection.
But this idea got me thinking about what the best such intermediary might be for large-scale general deployment.
SiCS Multicore Days 2008: Talk about Threading Simics (updated)
I will give a presentation on how Simics was threaded and how we created a parallel virtual platform system at the SiCS Multicore Days 2008, which takes place in Kista, Sweden, on September 11 and 12. The schedule is now up (so I edited the post and added updated to the title), at http://www.sics.se/node/3182, and my talk is on Friday, Sept 12, at 13.00 in “track 2″. Speaker bios and abstracts are also online.
Even apart from my own humble participation, I think the event itself will be well worth attending. Last year was really good and serious fun! See my writeups from last year: part 1 and part 2 (and a short note on the Rock processor and transactional memory).
Swedish Workshop on Multicore 2008: Nov 27-28: CFP!
The first Swedish Workshop on Multicore Computing (MCC) will take place in Ronneby on November 27 and 28, 2008. The call for papers is now out, and it is open until September 26. If you have something cool to present or publish about multicore computing, and happen to be here in Sweden, please do submit an abstract!
Disclosure: I am in the program committee for this event.
Power Architecture Conference slides online
The slides from the Power Architecture Conference in München and Paris are now online (and have been for a few weeks) at the Power.org site for the event. Some interesting things there about Power Architecture in particular but also virtual platforms were an almost main theme of the show.
Power Architecture Conference München 2008
On Tuesday next week, I will be presenting at the Power Architecture Conference (PAC) in München, Germany. The topics will be multicore debug using virtual hardware, and the new Simics Accelerator technology. Especially Simics Accelerator is pretty interesting technology.
It is a simple idea, using multiple host cores to run a virtual platform, with fairly amazing results. Now, using a single computer we can run fairly incredible simulations that were the realm of pure fantasy just a few years ago. We also got a nice new little box to demonstrate it with, an eight-core Dell with 16 GB of RAM. With 64-bit Linux, this thing makes my Core 2 Duo laptop with 32-bit Vista look like yesteryear’s snail… And creates that giggling feeling that a really impressive new toy brings up in even the most grown up boys. Booting a 16-machine network of PowerPC boards was so fast it was not demoworthy. I think we have to up the ante to some 100 target machines to make it interesting, and I have no doubt that a combination of multithreading and idle-loop optimization will make that thing be usefully interactive from the target command lines. There are many other wild things we could try on that demo box, once it gets back from the Power Architecture Conferences tour.
ESC Silicon Valley 2008 — Report
Now the ESC SV 2008 is over. I really enjoyed going to the show this year, and presenting on simulation for embedded systems. The topic has to be heating up, I had some fifty people listen to the talk, which is really very good. Hope that they learnt how to build good transaction-level hardware models, and have some idea on how to apply this to their own projects. Hopefully, I can come back next year for the ESC 2009 (update: this did not happen) and do it again (even though the recent travel trouble makes it a less attractive idea to fly back here right now…).