The book “Taxonomies for the Development and Verification of Digital Systems“, edited by Brian Bailey, Grant Martin, and Thomas Andersson, was published in 2005 by Springer Verlag. It is a legacy of the defunct VSIA, and presents an attempt to bring order to nomenclature and taxonomies in the chip design field (its scope is defined to be broader than that, but in essence, the book is about SoC design for the most part).
Tag Archives: Research
Book review: Taxonomies for the … Digital Systems
Multicore Expo US 2008
The Multicore Expo US 2008 is taking place next week (April 1-3) in Santa Clara, CA. I was originally slated to talk there, but since I am going to the Embedded Systems Conference a few weeks later it was too much travel in too short a time frame to do. I happy that Ross Dickson, a senior technology specialist at Virtutech could take my place. He will do just as good a job as I would, and he also has his own session to present at the Expo.
Our talk will be on how approximate you can be in simulating multicore computers, and still get useful results out from the software running on the simulator. It is something that we at Virtutech have spent a lot of time working on, and we want to bring our results to a wider community. Really exciting to present, and it is a pity that I could not be there myself.
The Register reporting from SC’07
The Register has a pretty good report from the Supercomputing (SC) 2007 conference. Quite knowledgeable, and mostly about the thorny issue of programming massively parallel fairly homogeneous machines likes GPUs and floating-point accelerators. Of course, their commentary has to be commented on. Read on for more.
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.
Simon Kågström, PhD
The most important data in the PhD thesis is really just how much work it is to do an SMP port of an OS kernel. And how hard it is to get performance up to good levels even with several years of work. Really emphasizes the point that hard work and perseverance and just lots of calendar time is what it takes to create a good SMP OS. That’s why Solaris and AIX are still years ahead of Linux in this respect — you just need to hit the snags, fix them, retest, and hit the next snag. It takes time to polish, basically.
So, if you have any interest in multiprocessor operating systems, Simon’s work is well-worth a read. Also check out his blog at http://simonkagstrom.livejournal.com/. And by the way, he did pass.