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.
I also liked the way in which this research group is doing very many runs on each experiment, which would seem to provide a much firmer basis for results than the all-too-common “do a few runs and be done with it” approach. All in all, a very interesting piece of work, and I am looking forward to seeing more published results from this group!