Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
This blog post was originally posted at Intel back in 2018, but it has since been retired from the Intel blog system. As it is of general interest (in my opinion), here is a reposting (with a few small updates here and there). Temporal decoupling is a key technology in virtual platforms, and can speed … Continue reading “Some Notes on Temporal Decoupling (Reposted)”
A few weeks ago, I talked about temporal decoupling in virtual platforms at DVCon Europe 2018. I just posted some additional notes on the topic temporal decoupling on my Intel blog. In this new blog post, I discuss some more aspects of temporal decoupling, and how it affects simulation semantics. I also explain some of … Continue reading “Intel Blog Post: Additional Notes on Temporal Decoupling”
This year’s Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon Europe) takes place on October 24 and 25 (2018). DVCon Europe has turned into the best conference for virtual platform topics, and this year is no exception. There are some good talks coming!
I am just finishing off reading the chapters of the Processor and System-on-Chip Simulation book (where I was part of contributing a chapter), and just read through the chapter about the Tensilica instruction-set simulator (ISS) solutions written by Grant Martin, Nenad Nedeljkovic and David Heine. They have a slightly different architecture from most other ISS … Continue reading “Interrupts and Temporal Decoupling”
The time has come to do something new. I am leaving Intel (and the Intel Simics team) at the end of September (2024). After more than twenty years with the team and the product this is a big step into the unknown. But when Intel offered a “retirement” package as part of its current round … Continue reading “Time to Do Something New”
The Design and Verification Conference (DVCon) Europe is going to be in-person in München again in 2022. After two years of virtual conferences, we are going back to the Holiday Inn where we have had so many great events in the past. The conference takes place on December 6 and 7. The call for papers, … Continue reading “DVCon Europe 2022 – Come Join us in München in December”
I have written before about the debug advice to “Quit thinking and look.” It means that you should not form conclusions prematurely. Stop and look at what is going on instead of guessing and cooking up theoretical scenarios. Sound advice that I completely failed to follow in the case that I just chronicled on my … Continue reading “Intel Blog Post: “Quit Thinking and Look” – Mea Culpa Chasing a Performance Bug”
I have been working with computer simulation and computer architecture for more than 20 years, and one thing that has been remarkably stable over time is the simulation slowdown inherent in “cycle accurate” computer simulation. Regardless of who I talked to or what they were modeling, the simulators ran at around 100 thousand times slower … Continue reading “Simulating Computer Architecture with “Mechanistic” Models – No more 100k Slowdown?”
DVCon Europe took place in München, Bayern, Germany, on October 24 and 25, 2018. Here are some notes from the conference, including both general observations and some details on a few papers that were really quite interesting. This is not intended as an exhaustive replay, just my personal notes on what I found interesting.
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 … Continue reading “GPGPU for Instruction-Set Simulation – Maybe, Maybe not”
Since I have a certain interest in debugging, I was happy find the article “Guidelines for SystemC – Debugger Integration” at the usually interesting Design and Reuse website. However, I must say that it was pretty disappointing.
I just found a recent paper on the topic of parallel simulation of computer systems. Christopher Schumacher et al., published an articles at CODES+ISSS in October of 2010 talking about “parSC: Synchronous Parallel SystemC Simulation on Multicore Architectures“. Essentially, parallel SystemC.
Being a bit of a computer history buff, I am often struck by how most key concepts and ideas in computer science and computer architecture were all invented in some form or the other before 1970. And commonly by IBM. This goes for caches, virtual memory, pipelining, out-of-order execution, virtual machines, operating systems, multitasking, byte-code … Continue reading “The 1970 rule strikes again: Virtual Platform Principles in 1967”
It must have been Google Alerts that send me a link to the HOTOS 2007 (Hot Topics in Operating Systems) paper by Tal Garfinkel, Keith Adams, Andrew Warfield, and Jason Franklin called Compatibility is not Transparency: VMM Detection Myths and Realities. This paper is slightly less than a year old today, so it is old … Continue reading “VMM Detection Myths and Realities from a Simics and Embedded Perspective”