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
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
More from the SiCS multicore days 2008.