Just like in 2006, I went to the Øredev conference in Malmö and presented a workshop using Virtutech Simics. This year, I worked with Jonas Svennebring from Freescale and we created a workshop around parallelizing network processing software for running on a multicore Freescale processor. The workshop went reasonably well, and the participants definitely learned something about what we trying to get across, even though we did not have much time to actualy complete the programming assignments.
We might have tried to cover a bit much material, talking about both multicore hardware, pthreads programming, simulation of computer systems, and the practicalties of using Simics and cross-compilers. But it sure is a rocking good lab! It is very cool seeing traffic flow from a traffic generator into the virtual MPC8641D device, being picked up by a program, processed, and sent out again. Using Simics to see the load on each processor in the system as the program runs.
Due to general overload of my calendar, I could not stay for more days at the conference, but from what I heard it is clear that Øredev still maintains a position as a very good conference for software development (and embedded development). It is very much a software conference, but there are lots of people doing embedded development close to the hardware there still.
Most of the talks are somewhat off from my core interests in embedded systems, but that really gives you a good chance to hear what is hot in the enterprise and general IT fields. Last year I attended talks about Java programming, agile methods, and agile testing, for example. Even though I will likely never code in Microsoft .net, it is good to know a bit what it is all about.
Note that concurrency, and thus the parallelism revolution, were present in several of the topics presented as workshops and seminars this year. For example, workshops concurrency in .net and large-scale software using SOA both
Øredev 2008 is recommended!