FDL Impressions

fdllogosmallThis is end of the second day of FDL 2009, and it is proving to be quite an interesting experience. The location is very bad, apart from the weather (coming from a Swedish Fall where temperatures are dropping towards 10 C, to a sunny 27 C is quite nice). But Sophia Antipolis is just a tech park with some hotels, and you cannot get anywhere interesting or civilized without a car. No shops, no restaurants except for hotels, and so sidewalks in parts.

But the conference is good enough to be worth the bodily discomforts. And I did find a nice Parcours Sportif for the morning run, as well as a nice breakfast buffet at the Mercure Hotel.

So what were the highlights and themes of FDL?

  • SystemC is literally everywhere, it is really the only simulation kernel that researchers are using. Often not so much for hardware simulation, as rather for general simulation of timed concurrent processes. Not exactly what it was designed for…
  • There is a lot of work on bridging abstraction levels and using multiple levels of timing detail for different purposes. That is a nice change from a tradition of “everything has to be cycle accurate” that tended to come out of hardware design in previous years.
  • Architecture exploration is big, as always.
  • Validity of virtual platforms and models keep coming up, some people are really too concerned about precise agreement with hardware. In practice, it does not matter than much if it is only 95% correct and 90% complete, as the software will work well enough anyway for the platform to be useful… but that is a hard message for hardware people to accept.
  • ST-Ericsson’s ex-NXP local office gave a couple of interesting presentation of how they were using SystemC. For one of the groups, they had an interesting confusion between “SystemC” and “Virtual Platforms”. They could not quite keep the language and application of it apart, which is indicative of the language-centricity of hardware designers in general. They did not even equate it with their tool, which would have been logical (they are using CoWare).
  • Peter Flake made some really good points and asked good questions in almost every presentation session. I definitely respect his deep understanding .

I presented my talk on SystemC and Checkpointing, and it was quite interesting to hear the questions. The two main themes of my presentation was the explicit conversion from internal state to the external state held in a checkpoint, and the necessity to not use threads to enable decent checkpointing. The threading discussion continued for a quite a while… and led to some interesting observations.

It seems that most people can accept the idea of abandoning threads in SystemC for hardware modeling– but not for software modeling :). Essentially, considering a hardware unit as an event-driven state machine is fairly natural and easy to understand. But when people try to model software behavior (directly in a SystemC model, not using an ISS to run the real code), they tend to think that threads are more natural and easy. However, for a typical software development use-case for a virtual platform you will run software on an ISS. I think we might have a useful generally acceptable design point for modeling coming up here, with hardware modeled as event-driven blocks that can be checkpointed and controlled by the simulator.

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