In my work at Virtutech trying to explain Simics and its simulation philosophy, it is often a struggle to get people to accept that what seems like pretty brutal simplifications of the world actually work quite nicely. Recently, I found a nice analogy in a golf game/simulator. The type where you swing a real club and send a real golf ball through the air.
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Monthly Archives: September 2007
Golf Games and Computer Simulations
Comment on Joel Spolsky and Programming to “Moores Law”
Joel Spolsky is always worth a read, and in his post Strategy Letter VI he has a lot of smart things to say about how to consider programming. His basic message is that if you optimize your code too much to work well and fit in the memory of a current machine, by the time that you are done, you find yourself run over by competitors that just assumed machines would be faster and used the same programming time to implement cooler products.
I just have to take issue with this.
Applications that can make use of more compute power (e.g., iPod Video)
A question that pops up quite often when computer architects and representatives from firms like Intel encounter a crowd today is but just what do you need more computing power for????. Most regular users are fairly happy with the speed at which they process words, surf the web, read email, do IP phone calls, crunch numbers in Excel, and other common tasks. It is hard to perceive the need for more speed in everyday tasks, unlike a decade or two ago when you could definitely ask for improvement. I remember scrolling a page in PageMaker on a Mac SE (8Mhz 68000). You counted the clicks and waited for the screen to jump, redraw, jump, redraw, stabilize… quite a different experience from working with modern computers and far more complex software that still responds instantaneously to almost any work.
Handbook of Real-Time and Embedded Systems
The “Handbook of Real-Time and Embedded Systems” (ToC, Amazon, CRC Press) is now out. I and my university research colleague and friend Andreas Ermedahl have written a chapter on worst-case execution time analysis. We talk some about the theories and techniques, but we try to discuss practical experience in actual industrial use. Both static, dynamic, and hybrid techniques are covered.
I just got my personal copy, but my first impression of the book overall is very positive. The contents seems quite practical to a large extent, not as academic as one might have feared. Do check it out if you are into the field. It is not a collection of research paper, rather instructive chapters informed by solid research but with applications in mind.
Off-Topic: Video in the iPod Nano (Update, updated once)
A short update to the previous posting on how to compress video for the nano.
It turns out that the “iPod video” profile of Nero Recode is half aimed at showing video from your iPod on external devices. That’s the only good reason for the “high” resolution. I typically got a video size of 15MB per minute with these settings, which quickly fills up even gigabytes of space.
Using the “iPod Video-AVC” profile instead is optimized for viewing on the Nano itself and not on some external device. The resolution is down to 320×200-240 depending on source aspect ratio. And the resulting files are only about 5MB per minute, much more manageable for carrying a large video library on an iPod. I cannot see any difference in the quality of the output…
Update (2007-September-23): The default iPod-AVC setting has some issue with rapid cross-fades between scenes. To get around this, I set the quality settings to “2-pass” and “highest quality” in the detailed settings you can make in the second screen before moving on to actually encode things. This created very nice looking video that had no problems handling even the previously broken fades.
The cost was even more compute time. I think the current settings takes some 5 to 10 hours per material hour to encode (on my Athlon XP 2700+, not exactly a screamer by current standards).
AMD three-core Phenom
Spotted at EETimes.com – Odd move: AMD plans three-core CPU . Interesting that someone in the mainstream finally breaks the 1-2-4-8 progression that seems to be the norm.
Off-Topic: Getting video onto an iPod Nano (3G/Video)
This is not in my self-assigned range of topics, but I like when other people put up their helpful notes of how to accomplish some task that I am researching. Thus, I feel obliged to do the same when I have tested something reasonably new.
The task at hand here is “how to get video into an iPod Nano”.
SICS Multicore Day 2007 – More on Programming
Some more thoughts on how to program multicore machines that did not make it into my original posting from last week. Some of this was discussed at the multicore day, and others I have been thinking about for some time now.
One of the best ways to handle any hard problem is to make it “somebody else’s problem“. In computer science this is also known as abstraction, and it is a very useful principle for designing more productive programming languages and environments. Basically, the idea I am after is to let a programmer focus on the problem at hand, leaving somebody else to fill in the details and map the problem solution onto the execution substrate.
A logo from 1996 and simulation for archival purposes
Back in 1996, DVP celebrated its 15th anniversary. When looking through my digital and paper archive, I found this gem: 
The official badge and logo for the 1996 anniversary! We also produced some mouse pads with this logo on them, one of which I still use for my daily job. Pretty good quality I must say.
The picture shown here was saved as GIF for use on the web. But scarily enough, apart from a few more GIF files, I could not open or even understand the file type of most of the files from that time, only ten years ago. Our digital archives are not very robust — more on that below.
Power.Org Dev Con: C Domination a Problem for Multicore
I just read a EETimes report from a panel at the Power.org Developers Conference (actually, it is more accurately called the Power Architecture Developers Conference, of PADC), about programming multicore processors for the embedded market. Note that I was not there in person, so I can only take the few quotes in the article and comment on them. The main conclusions are that:
In a sense, blaming the market for not having the good sense to adapt new tools to tackle multicore.
I don’t think things have to be that bleak.
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