There is a new post at my Wind River blog, telling the story of how some of the Simics developers used Simics itself to debug an intermittent Simics program crash caused by a timing-sensitive race condition.
Running Simics on itself is pretty cool, and shows the power of the simulator and its applicability even to really complex software.
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.
I was recently pointed to a 2011 SPLASH presentation by David Ungar, an IBM researcher working on parallel programming for manycore systems. In particular, in a project called Renaissance, run together with the Vrije Universiteit Brussels in Belgium (VUB) and Portland State University in the US. The title of the presentation is “Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong! A Wild Screed about the Future“, and it has provoked some discussion among people I know about just how wrong is wrong.
I just finished reading the October 2010 issue of Communications of the ACM. It contained some very good articles on performance and parallel computing. In particular, I found the ACM Case Study on the parallelism of Photoshop a fascinating read. There was also the second part of Cary Millsap’s articles about “Thinking Clearly about Performance”.
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.
I have another blog up at Wind River. This one is about multicore bugs that cannot happen on multithreaded systems, and is called True Concurrency is Truly Different (Again). It bounces from a recent interesting Windows security flaw into how Simics works with multicore systems.
I have a new blog post up at the Wind River blog network, about the new target analysis tools in Simics 4.4. It is a very fun piece of technology to play with, and you learn a lot just by poking around at existing software systems…
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.
Past Tuesday, I attended the Freescale Design With Freescale (DWF) one-day technology event in Kista, Stockholm. This is a small-scale version of the big Freescale Technology Forum, and featured four tracks of talks running from the morning into the afternoon. All very technical, aimed at designing engineers.
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 →
Freescale has now released the collected, updated, and restyled book version of the article series on embedded multicore that I wrote last year together with Patrik Strömblad of Enea, and Jonas Svennebring, and John Logan of Freescale. The book covers the basics of multicore software and hardware, as well as operating systems issues and virtual platforms. Obviously, the virtual platform part was my contribution.
I have a short article on multicore systems development and virtual platforms in the May 2009 issue of ECN magazine, over at www.ecnmag.com.
In my series (well, I have one previous post about checkpointing) about misunderstood simulation technology items, the turn has come to the most difficult of all it seems: determinism. Determinism is often misunderstood as meaning “unchanging” or “constant” behavior of the simulation. People tend to assume that a deterministic simulation will not reveal errors due to nondeterministic behavior or races in the modeled system, which is a complete misunderstanding. Determinism is a necessary feature of any simulation system that wants to be really helpful to its users, not an evil that hides errors.
Unknown to most, IBM has one of the world’s longest records of using virtual platforms for software and firmware development and verification. This project has been ongoing since at least the days of the zSeries 900 machines, through z990, z9, and now z10. An excellent article on this virtual platform and its uses is found in the IBM Journal of Research and Development, number 1, 2009, . It is called “IBM System z10 Firmware Simulation”, by Körner et al.
Embedded.com just listed the ten most visited articles on their website during 2008, and my contribution on debugging multiprocessor code was number ten. If you want some more meat around multiprocessor debug, please peruse the various papers and presentations found on my personal website.
I have an article appearing in the latest issue of Elektronik i Norden, about using virtual platforms for multicore computer systems. It is framed in the context of the Freescale multicore push, in particular the QorIQ P4080, and addresses the common issues of debug, execution speed, and the need to zoom in on details every once in a while.
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.
I have another short technical piece published about Multicore Debug at the EETimes (and their network of related publications, like Embedded.com). Pretty short piece, and they cut out some bits to make it fit their format. Nothing new to fans of virtual platforms for software development, basically we can use virtual platforms to reintroduce control over parallel and for all practical purposes chaotic hardware/software systems.
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.
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.
By means of a trip down virtualization history, I found a real gem in 1969 paper called A program simulator by partial interpretation, by Kazuhiro Fuchi, Hozumi Tanaka, Yuriko Manago, Toshitsugu Yuba of the Japanese Government Electrotechnical Laboratory. It was published at the second symposium on Operating systems principles (SOSP) in 1969. It describes a system where regular target instructions are directly interpreted, and any privileged instructions are trapped and simulated. Very similar to how VmWare does it for x86, or any other modern virtualization solution.