Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
I have just released a new blog post on my Intel Developer Zone blog, about how Simics runs large huge workloads. I look back at the kinds of workloads that ran on Simics back in 1998 when the product first went commercial, and then look at some current examples running on Simics. This is the first post in a series intended to celebrate 20 years of Simics as a commercial product.
Continue reading “Intel Blog Post: Running Large Workloads on Simics – in 1998 and 2018”
Intel CoFluent Technology is a simulation and modeling tool that can be used for a wide variety of different systems and different levels of scale – from the micro-architecture of a hardware accelerator, all the way up to clustered networked big data systems. On the Intel Evangelist blog on the Intel Developer Zone, I have a write-up on how CoFluent is being used to do model just that: Big Data systems. I found the topic rather fascinating, how you can actually make good predictions for systems at that scale – without delving into details. At some point, I guess systems become big enough that you can start to make accurate predictions thanks to how things kind of smooth out when they become large enough.
Simics and other simulation solutions are a great way to add more variation to your software testing. I have just documented a nice case of this on my blog at the Intel Developer Zone (IDZ), where the Simics team found a bug in how Xen deals with MPX instructions when using VT-x. Thanks to running on Simics, where scenarios not available in current hardware are easy to set up.
Continue reading “Intel Blog: Why Target Variation Matters (finding a Xen bug)”
This really happened last week, but I was in the US for the DAC then. I did another blog on Intel Software blog, about a white paper that Wind River put out about how they use Simics internally. The white paper is a really good set of examples of how Simics can be used for software development, test, and debug – regardless of how old or new the hardware is. It also touches my favorite topic of IoT simulation and scaling up – Wind River is actually using Simics for 1000+ node tests of IoT software! Read on at https://blogs.intel.com/evangelists/2016/06/06/wind-river-uses-simics-test-massive-iot-networks/
I have posted my first blog post to the Intel Software and Services blog channel. The Intel Software and Services blog is one channel in the Intel corporate blog you find at https://blogs.intel.com/. Other bloggers on the Software and Services channel write about security, UEFI, cloud, graphics, open source software, and other topics. Intel has a large software development community, and we produce quite a bit of software – and we do write about the innovations that come out of Intel that rely on software.
On my part, I will be posting more materials on simulation at Intel, as part of my role as a simulation evangelist on the Software and Service blog channel.
Intel is a big Simics user, but most of the time Intel internal use of Simics is kept internal. However, we recently had the chance to interview Karthik Kumar and Thomas Willhalm of Intel about how they used Simics to interact with external companies and improve Intel hardware designs. The interview is found on the Wind River blog network.
It is also my last blog post written at Wind River; since January 18, I am working at Intel. I am working on ways to keep publishing texts about Simics and simulation, but the details are not yet clear.
At the Wind River corporate blog, there is a blog post that I wrote about continuous integration and Simics. At the Elsevier Computer Science Connect blog, there is also a blog post about continuous integration and Simics that I wrote. These two texts are essentially the same, and I had the good fortune to get it posted in multiple places. The reason it is up at Elsevier is to help promote our soon-to-be-released book at about virtual platforms and simulation (and a little bit about Simics), and hopefully we will reach a larger audience with both messages: CI with Simics is a great idea, and the book is a great book to buy.
I just found the blog of an old real-time researcher friend of mine, John Regehr at the University of Utah.
It is at http://blog.regehr.org/ and covers a range of embedded topics relevant to his academic research (which is more embedded that most).
One of the many nice effects of the Wind River acquisition of Simics is that I will be blogging as part of the Wind River Blog network. My first post there is up now, and it is a short (at least compared to a textbook, I admit it looks terribly long for a blog post) overview of how Simics works inside.
I think it is important for users of technologically advanced tools to know a bit of how they work. A classic example of this is compilers, where I taught an ESC class almost a decade ago which is my most popular piece of writing to date…
For the next few months, I will be on parental leave, so there is likely to be less blogging about technical subjects (and less blogging overall). There is simply less inspiration about virtual platforms, and a bit more about toys.
I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but I have finally managed to put a custom icon on the RSS feed for this blog. It is a larger version of the icon used as “favicon” for this blog and www.engbloms.se. I got the idea from the RSS feeds reader on my SonyEricsson G900 phone, which showed a few feeds with icons, but most with a generic icon.
My hosting service just told me to update to WordPress 2.7 — as the previous version had known security holes. So I did, and after I upgraded, the blog itself broke.
Just after the first post on the front page, there was a nasty error message:
Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in .../functions.php on line ...
I managed to break the categories in my old system, moving everything to tags, after which my old theme turned out to be too old. So I will tweak this new theme some I think, but now tags is the way to organize this blog. Which was essentially how I misused categories previously.
This maintenance is going to take a while:
Annoying, and a bit funny.
