I just read a quite interesting article by Christian Pinto et al, “GPGPU-Accelerated Parallel and Fast Simulation of Thousand-core Platforms“, published at the CCGRID 2011 conference. It discusses some work in using a GPGPU to run simulations of massively parallel computers, using the parallelism of the GPU to speed the simulation. Intriguing concept, but the execution is not without its flaws and it is unclear at least from the paper just how well this generalizes, scales, or compares to parallel simulation on a general-purpose multicore machine.
Tag Archives: Simulation
GPGPU for Instruction-Set Simulation – Maybe, Maybe not
Article on CPCI and ATCA Systems on Virtual System Development
The article/editoral “Using virtual platforms to improve AdvancedTCA software development practice” is now up at CompactPCI and AdvancedTCA Systems, an online and paper journal for the rack-based market. It is about our experience at Virtutech in using virtual platforms to drive system and software development for “pretty large” target systems, even those based on standard hardware.
And really, there is no such thing as a standard embedded system. Even if you use a standard backplane and buy off-the-shelf boards and cards to put in it, the combination of cards and added mezzanine cards makes each system quite unique. If you could use completely standard PC hardware for your system with no custom additions or special IO units, the thing would in likelihood not actually be an embedded system.
In Praise of Scripting: Something for Modeling as Well?
In the July 2008 issue of IEEE Computer, there is short article called “In Praise of Scripting: Real Programming Pragmatism“, by Ronald P. Loui, a professor at Washington University (WUSTL). The article deals with the issue of what is the appropriate first language to teach new CS (Computer Science) students, and considers that a “scripting” langauge like Python or Ruby might be way better than Java (no doubt about that I think).
The interesting material in the article is the background on WHY he thinks that this is the case. He points to the immense popularity and rise of scripting in much of computing land. In the past ten years, it is clear to him (and I would agree with this too mostly) that languages like Perl, PHP, Awk, Ruby, JavaScript, and Python have eclipse Java and C++ as the most interesting and important programming languages for many practical tasks. Especially for web applications, where Java seems to have a presence but noone would dream of using something as clunky and impractical as C.
What can this teach us for the purpose of simulation and the creation of models of computer system hardware for the purpose of simulation? Maybe a fair bit…
Book review: Taxonomies for the … Digital Systems
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).
Building a Wooden Deck and Computer Simulation
I just spent the first week of Summer vacation practising the Swedish national sport of home renovation. It seems that everyone is doing that all the time nowadays – it might be that I have reached the age of family raising where that becomes important, or it might be that it is a general trend that more people spend more time and money renovating their homes. I think it is the second case.
Anyhow, what we set out to do this year was to replace (most of) the twenty-year-old wooden decking on the backside of our small row house with a new one. This was quite an adventure, as we discovered all kinds of interesting designs and problems with the old decking structure. Problems, which do reflect on the realities of computer programming and simulation.
ESC Silicon Valley 2008: Again
This is just a repeat post of http://jakob.engbloms.se/archives/75 . I will present at the ESC Silicon Valley, next Thursday, at 08.30 in the morning. On how to use simulation and virtualization to better develop embedded software.
As a side note, a few years ago, I presented on efficient C programming for IAR Systems, guess that would have made Jack Ganssle happy: he complained about the lack of resource-constrained C programming skills in today’s university graduates in a column at Embedded.com recently. Apparently, the major market-driven education companies in the US have also dropped plain C programming from the course rosters… sounds like an opportunity or void to be filled by the embedded companies. Buy a C compiler, get a free efficient programming course.
DATE 2008 Panel on Multicore Programming
I attended a DATE 2008 open exhibition panel discussion on multicore programming, organized by Gary Smith EDA. The panel was a few people short, and ended up with just Simon Davidmann of Imperas, Grant Martin of Tensilica, and Rudy Lauwereins of IMEC. A user representative from Ericsson was supposed to have been there but he never arrived. Overall, the panel was geared towards data-plane processing-type thinking, and a bit short on internal dissonance.
Golf Games and Computer Simulations
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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Cadence-Ran vs Synopsys-Frank over Low-Power and Virtual Things
Over the past few weeks there was a interesting exchange of blog posts, opinions, and ideas between Frank Schirrmeister of Synopsys and Ran Avinun of Cadence. It is about virtual platforms vs hardware emulation, and how to do low-power design “properly”. Quite an interesting exchange, and I think that Frank is a bit more right in his thinking about virtual platforms and how to use them. Read on for some comments on the exchange.
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