Observations from Uppsala – Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)

“Packet Networks are not Socket Science” – Computer and System Architecture Unraveled Event Two

On Wednesday, November 22, we had our second CaSA, Computer and System Architecture Unraveled, meetup. Same place in Kista as the last time, the 25^th floor of the Kista Science Tower building, thanks to the kind sponsorship of Vasakronan and our collaboration with Kista Science City. This time, the theme was networking – but not at the socket level. Per Holmberg presented how his team used “micro sleep” for power management in line-rate network processing, and Hans Brandberg talked about the Precision Time Protocol. Another great event!

Intel Blog: How Simics Executes Instructions

I recently added a blog post to the Intel Software blog about how the Intel Simics Simulator executes target-software instructions. The blog post appeared just before DVCon Europe (last week) and I did not have time to put a reflector here earlier.

IBM WatsonX-AI, Kista Tech Tuesday

I attended a short Tech Tuesday morning session at IBM here in Kista, Sweden, where IBM presented their WatsonX-AI and related technologies. Tech Tuesdays is a monthly technical event organized by Kista Science City, where companies in Kista present some aspect of their technology in a 30-minute session. IBM managed to get an impressive amount of content into that time!

The first Computer and System Architecture Unraveled Event in Kista – Great Speakers, Great Fun!

On the evening of the last Wednesday in September, we had our first CaSA, Computer and System Architecture Unraveled, event. CaSA is a meetup in Kista (Sweden) for people interested in computer architecture, system architecture, and how software and hardware interact down towards the lower levels of the stack. The topic for the inaugural event was “Core Count Explosion: A Challenge for Hardware and Software”, and it was great in some many ways!

RI.SE AI Day – More on LLMs (and some)

The Swedish research institute RI.SE hosted an “Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science day” (AI and CS day) last week. RI.SE has a long tradition of hosting interesting open houses, both as RI.SE and in their previous guide as SiCS. The day was a mix of organized talks in the morning, and an open house where RI.SE researchers showed off their work in the afternoon. Most of the AI discussions were related to large language models (LLMs), but not all. I got some new insights about LLMs in general and using LLMs for coding in particular.

Adventures Traveling to and from Italy

The big family vacation his summer was a cruise in the Mediterranean. Most cruises sail from Italian ports, unfortunately. Traveling to and within Italy is a bit of a challenge, resulting in far more heartburn and stress than necessary. Here is our story.

The HidrateSpark… Internet of Drinking Bottles

Earlier this Summer, I received a HidrateSpark PRO water bottle as a gift. It is a fascinating piece of “smart” technology. The bottle itself is a decent piece of engineering and a somewhat practical product. But the overall product concept just strikes me as mostly contrived. The associated app is almost comical in its attempts to turn a piece of hardware into a “service”.

Intel Blog: Demonstrating Simics Threading using RISC-V Simple

In my third post based on the Simics RISC-V simple virtual platform, I use the it to demonstrate how the Intel Simics simulator uses multiple host threads to simulate multiple target cores. The RISC-V platform is nice in that it has less noise than more complex platforms, allowing for clear and simple measurements.

That’s Odd: How iCue and Windows 11 Ruin Simics Performance

While working on some screenshots for an upcoming blog, I noticed something that something was off with the performance of Simics on my Windows 11 laptop. The CPU load did not quite go as high as I am used to – typically, compute-intense run should get close to 100% processor load using a single host thread to execute the simulation. Instead, I got to no more than about 50%, which was decidedly odd. I also had a screenshot from a few days earlier that showed some 90% CPU load. Turns out the culprit was a combination of factors, including the Windows 11 scheduler and the Corsair iCUE software pack.

Intel Blog: Playing with Instruction Sets in the Public Simics RISC-V Platform

As noted previously, the Public Release of the Intel Simics Simulator has added a simple RISC-V virtual platform.

In my second blog post about the platform, I reconfigure the instruction set, crash Linux, debug the issue, and reconfigure the software to match the hardware.

Intel Blog: Public Simics RISC-V Simple Virtual Platform

The 2023-19 version of the Public Release of the Intel Simics Simulator added a simple RISC-V virtual platform. This is the second architecture supported by the public release, after x86.

I will be producing a series of blog posts to show a bit of what the you can do with this virtual platform. The f irst Intel blog post talks about system-level simulation use cases, in particular networking and simulating x86 and RISC-V systems together.

Berlin – Cold War, Third Reich, and Ukraine

A few weeks ago I visited Berlin. A fantastically interesting city, and much more affordable and accessible than places like New York or London. However, it is almost comical how much of what you see ends up being about either the Third Reich or the Cold War and the DDR. The war in Ukraine was also noticeably present.

Paste as Plain Text

Windows PowerToys is a fantastic set of utilities for Windows, and it just got better with the addition of “Paste as Plain Text”. Just like the mouse pointer locator I blogged about before, it is a small thing that you get used to and immediately notice if it is absent.

ChatGPT and Legal

In previous three blog posts (1,2,3) about ChatGPT in particular and large language models in general, I touched on what they can do, what they cannot do, what they seem not to do, how they fall down in funny ways, and why I think they are fundamentally flawed for many applications. There is one more aspect left to consider – the legal and licensing side. I am not a lawyer, I am not an expert, but it seems obvious that there is a huge problem. There are also clear questions about business morals and what the right thing to do would be. I also doubt the business viability of LLMs in the way they are currently trained.

ChatGPT and Critique

ChatGPT and other transformer-based models like Dall-E are technologically very impressive. They do things that seemed totally impossible just a few years ago. However, they are not really generally intelligent, and there are innumerable problems with how they work, what they do, what people think they do, ethics, and legal and licensing issues. This is my third post about ChatGPT, where I present my critique of and reflections on the technology. The previous posts were about ChatGPT and Simics and Coding using ChatGPT.