Monthly Archives: April 2010

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First Blog at Wind River!

2010 April 29 20:14 / Leave a Comment /

One of the many nice effects of the Wind River acquisition of Simics is that I will be blogging as part of the Wind River Blog network. My first post there is up now, and it is a short (at least compared to a textbook, I admit it looks terribly long for a blog post) overview of how Simics works inside.

I think it is important for users of technologically advanced tools to know a bit of how they work. A classic example of this is compilers, where I taught an ESC class almost a decade ago which is my most popular piece of writing to date…

Posted in: articles, blogging, computer simulation technology, virtual platforms, Wind River Blog / Tagged:

Eyjafjallajökull is Showing us Something

2010 April 18 20:06 / 1 Comment /

Wow. The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland and the resulting ashcloud has had an effect that I would never ever have expected. A near-total closing down of the European airspace is such a drastic thing to happen to nobody seems to have expected. It has certainly not been included in the list of worst-case scenarios to plan for in company and government contingency plans. Where does this leave us? In a very interesting situation indeed. Worst-case, we will have to do without air travel for months.

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Posted in: business issues, history, off-topic, transportation, travel / Tagged: , ,

FFast: Good Idea, Too Bad About the Implementation

2010 April 11 20:23 / Leave a Comment /

I just read a short paper by Antoine Trouvé and Kazuaki Murakami from the RAPIDO 2010 workshop on “rapid simulation and performance evaluation”. The paper is “FFast: Efficient Application of Compiled Simulation Techniques To A Fast ISS Over a Virtual Machine”. It explores the interesting idea of how an existing virtual machine infrastructure can be used to build a fast instruction-set simulator, and in the extension, a full system simulator.

To me, this idea is worth exploring, since using a mature VM like the .net CLR (used in this paper) or a JVM would offer a shortcut to get high-quality code generation for a JIT compiler. It could also offer other benefits, as these environments support many advanced configuration and management features. I have touched on this topic before, in the posts “Dream ESL Language” (VM as the basis for a simulator) and “The JVM as Universal Parallel Glue” (that a common VM can  offer huge benefits for an ecosystem).

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Posted in: computer simulation technology, virtual machines, virtual platforms / Tagged: , , , , , ,

Matt’s Today in History: System/360

2010 April 8 10:58 / Leave a Comment /

I am a regular listener to the Matt’s Today in History podcast. When Matt asked for contributions for this spring (in order to meet a goal of 500 podcasts before Summer) I did give some thought to what I could contribute. Looking over some books, I found one suitable Spring date: the launch of the IBM System/360 back in 1964. The resulting podcast is now live at Matt’s Today in History.

Please be kind to any mistakes… I am trying to paint a broad picture for a computer-history-ignorant audience here.

Posted in: appearances, history of computing / Tagged: , ,