There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how we have made Simics work with the Simulink Processor-in-the-Loop (PIL). This was a pretty interesting project, with a lot going on behind the scenes to realize what looks deceptively simple on the surface. Read the Wind River blog post for the details!
Chapter one of “Software and System Development Using Virtual Platforms”
The first chapter of mine and Daniel Aarno’s book Software and System Development Using Virtual Platforms can be downloaded from the Wind River Blog or the Elsevier Scitechconnect blog.
The purpose of the free chapter is to provide a way to understand the style of the book – and hopefully lead people on to buy the whole thing to read it.
The paperback edition looks really nice, and the printed copies that I have had the honor to get have been very well made.
Wind River Blog: Continuous Integration, in two versions
At the Wind River corporate blog, there is a blog post that I wrote about continuous integration and Simics. At the Elsevier Computer Science Connect blog, there is also a blog post about continuous integration and Simics that I wrote. These two texts are essentially the same, and I had the good fortune to get it posted in multiple places. The reason it is up at Elsevier is to help promote our soon-to-be-released book at about virtual platforms and simulation (and a little bit about Simics), and hopefully we will reach a larger audience with both messages: CI with Simics is a great idea, and the book is a great book to buy.
Why DO Computers Fail?
I just found and read an old text in the computer systems field, “Why Do Computers Fail and What Can Be Done About It?” , written by Jim Gray at Tandem Computers in 1985. It is a really nice overview of the issues that Tandem had encountered in their customer based, back in the early 1980s. The report is really a classic in the computer systems field, but I did not read it until now. Tandem was an early manufacturer of explicitly fault tolerant and highly reliable and available computers. In this technical report Jim Gray describes the basic principles of fault tolerance, and what kinds of faults happen in the field and that need to be tolerated.
Segway – Fun but not Mandatory
Recently, I finally got to ride (if that is the right word) a Segway two-wheeler. Quite fun, actually. But when thinking hard about it, it really seems like a pretty pointless invention. Cool technology, fantastic control system design and programming – but still, it does not solve any real problem. As a product manager, my mind tends to view new things with an eye toward “what is the problem they are trying to solve” rather than how fun, attractive, or well-designed they are. Sometimes, good design is the point, of course. However, in this case, we are talking about a transportation device, and as such, the question is where it fits.
Microsoft Catapult – Real Interesting Research at Real Scale
At the ISCA 2014 conference (the biggest event in computer architecture research), a group of researchers from Microsoft Research presented a paper on their Catapult system. The full title of the paper is “A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Large-Scale Datacenter Services“, and it is about using FPGAs to accelerate search engine queries at datacenter scale. It has 23 authors, which is probably the most I have ever seen on an interesting paper. There are many things to be learnt from and discussed about this paper, and here are my thoughts on it.
Continue reading “Microsoft Catapult – Real Interesting Research at Real Scale”
Wind River Blog: A Million Simics Runs (and lots of cool technology)
During my vacation, a blog post went up on the Wind River blog with an interview with Hyungmin Cho, a researcher at Stanford. Hyungmin has done some seriously heavy and cool work with Simics, using it together with a circuit-level simulator to investigate error resiliency in hardware devices, and how errors propagate from hardware into the software. As part of this process, he has setup an automated test system using Simics, and this system has done more than a million automated Simics runs. That is an insane number – I have been using Simics for twelve years now, and if I had used it every day for all these years, I would have had to start 10 runs per hour, every hour of the day. It shows the power of automation along with parallel runs on clusters of machines – once the setup is automated, you can pour on the volume.
Continue reading “Wind River Blog: A Million Simics Runs (and lots of cool technology)”
Off-Topic: Military History Tourism in Göteborg
This is another vacation-related post, of the kind that I do every once in a year or so. I recently came back from a family vacation to Gothenburg (Göteborg in Swedish), where I had some time to visit a few great museums dealing with history, and in particular with military history and the history of technology.
Continue reading “Off-Topic: Military History Tourism in Göteborg”
Busy Writing a Book About Simics
For the past six months I have not been doing much blogging at all, neither here nor on the Wind River blog. The reason is that I have been directing my writing energy into writing a text book about Simics together with Daniel Aarno at Intel. Last year, Daniel and I worked on an Intel Technology Journal issue on Simics. The ITJ issue was kind of a first step on the way to the book, collecting several articles about Simics usage at Intel and elsewhere. The book itself will be much more of a detailed description of Simics and how it works and why it works the way it works.
I Like Windows 8 (More Precisely, Windows 8.1)
When Microsoft released Windows 8 in 2012, the operating system received an incredible amount of bad press. There were lots of good ideas, but also a lot of bad execution, and some pretty drastic changes to the old familiar way that personal computer desktops had worked since approximately 1995. Most people that voice an opinion about Windows 8 dislike it, whether it be on social media or in person. For some reason, I seem to be one of the few people who really like it. When I just recently got a new laptop at work and it came with old Windows 7, I was actually disappointed. Here is why.
Continue reading “I Like Windows 8 (More Precisely, Windows 8.1)”
“The Mill” – It just might Work!
The Mill is a new general-purpose high-performance processor design from out-of-the-box computing (http://ootbcomp.com/). They claim to beat typical high-end out-of-order (OOO) designs like the Intel Haswell generation by crazy factors, such as being 2.3x faster while using 2.3x less power compared to a Haswell. All the while costing less. Ignoring the cost aspect, the power and performance numbers are truly impressive – especially for general code. How can they do something so much better than what we have today? For general code? That requires some serious innovation. With that perspective, I ask myself where the Mill is really significantly different from what we have seen before.
The Lego Movie
Yesterday, I saw the Lego Movie with the entire family. I enjoyed it. Sure, it was a gigantic product placement for Lego – but that was kind of a given from the start, right? The story moved on at a good pace, and both the visual style and the storyline was a bit surprising.
Book Review: Paranormality
Paranormality – Why we believe the impossible, written by Professor Richard Wiseman, manages to combine four stories into a single book. Wiseman is a well-known name in skeptic circles, and this book does not disappoint in the debunking department. But it also uses the investigation of paranormal phenomena as a way to explain how our brains work. And then some. It all makes for a very satisfying read.
Book Review: Trust Me I’m Lying
Trust Me, I’m Lying – Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday is a brilliant book about the online media landscape, and how it is driving public discourse in a very bad direction. Ryan has a very interesting background, having worked in marketing and being part of the problem he describes. In his work, he has exploited the weaknesses of the new media landscape to get stories into blogs, press, and often national television. Stories about his clients, to get them attention and ultimately business. In this book, he describes what he did, how he did it, and why we as a society have a big problem. It has changed the way I read online media, and made me a lot more critical of things I previously did not take notice of.
Intel Technology Journal on Simics
The September 2013 issue of the Intel Technology Journal (which actually arrived in December) is all about Simics. Daniel Aarno of Intel and I served as the content architects for the issue, which meant that we managed to contributed articles from various sources, and wrote an introductory article about Simics and its usage in general. It has taken a while to get this journal issue out, and now that it is done it feels just great! I am very happy about the quality of all the ten contributed articles, and reading the final versions of them actually taught me some new things you could do with Simics! I already wrote about the issue in a Wind River blog post, so in this my personal blog I want to be a little bit more, well, personal.