“Processor Performance Insights and Optimization” – Computer and System Architecture Unraveled Event Four

Finally, the fourth CaSA, Computer and System Architecture Unraveled, meetup happened on November 6. It took far too long to get it organized, but we finally did it. The theme was about processor performance analysis and efficient processor implementation, offering two talks from very different perspectives. The location was almost the same as before, on the 19th floor of the Kista Science Tower building. Once more thanks to the sponsorship from Vasakronan and Kista Science City.

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DVCon Europe Report on Semiwiki

I posted my first post on Semiwiki! It is a short summary of what we learned at DVCon Europe 2024. Semiwiki is a blog and wiki for the “semiconductor” industry – i.e., it covers topics like EDA tools, semiconductor manufacturing and fabs, hardware design, software design, testing, validation, etc.

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DVCon Europe 2024 – AI and More

The 2024 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference took place on October 15 and 16, in its traditional location at the Holiday Inn Munich City Centre. This year there was even more talk of artificial intelligence than last year, and quite a few sessions related to virtual platforms. And lots of other interesting presentations and discussions.

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Schloss Dagstuhl (and a Seminar and Cerebras)

A month ago, I participated in a seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany, about “Discrete Algorithms on Modern and Emerging Compute Infrastructure”. Not my usual cup of tea, but it was very interesting and insightful nevertheless. I have attended a Dagstuhl seminar once before, back in 2003.

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Embedded Conference Scandinavia 2024

The Embedded Conference Scandinavia took place at Kistamässan in Kista, Sweden, on April 10 and 11 2024. This was a reboot of a show that used to run as a small tradeshow/exhibition plus technical talks until the pandemic hit. There was no Embedded Show anymore, just the Embedded Conference and its speaker program. The ECS was instead co-located with Elektronikmässan, the long-running and apparently thriving gathering for “electronics” companies in Sweden.  

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“RISC-V in Practice” – Computer and System Architecture Unraveled Event Three

On Wednesday, March 13, we had our third CaSA, Computer and System Architecture Unraveled, meetup. Same place as the previous, the 25th floor of the Kista Science Tower building, thanks to the kind sponsorship of Vasakronan and our collaboration with Kista Science City. The theme this time was “The RISC-V ISA in Practice”, with two speakers named Björn. Another great event!

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DVCon Europe 2023 – 10th Anniversary Edition

The 2023 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference took place on November 14 and 15, in the traditional location of the Holiday Inn Munich City Center. This was the 10th time the conference took place, serving as an excuse for a great anniversary dinner. Also new was the addition of a research track to provide academics publishing at the conference with the academic credit their work deserves. This year had a large number of papers related to virtual platforms, so writing this report has taken me longer than usual. There was just so much to cover.

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“Packet Networks are not Socket Science” – Computer and System Architecture Unraveled Event Two

On Wednesday, November 22, we had our second CaSA, Computer and System Architecture Unraveled, meetup. Same place in Kista as the last time, the 25th floor of the Kista Science Tower building, thanks to the kind sponsorship of Vasakronan and our collaboration with Kista Science City. This time, the theme was networking – but not at the socket level. Per Holmberg presented how his team used “micro sleep” for power management in line-rate network processing, and Hans Brandberg talked about the Precision Time Protocol. Another great event!

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IBM WatsonX-AI, Kista Tech Tuesday

I attended a short Tech Tuesday morning session at IBM here in Kista, Sweden, where IBM presented their WatsonX-AI and related technologies. Tech Tuesdays is a monthly technical event organized by Kista Science City, where companies in Kista present some aspect of their technology in a 30-minute session. IBM managed to get an impressive amount of content into that time!

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RI.SE AI Day – More on LLMs (and some)

The Swedish research institute RI.SE hosted an “Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science day” (AI and CS day) last week. RI.SE has a long tradition of hosting interesting open houses, both as RI.SE and in their previous guide as SiCS. The day was a mix of organized talks in the morning, and an open house where RI.SE researchers showed off their work in the afternoon. Most of the AI discussions were related to large language models (LLMs), but not all. I got some new insights about LLMs in general and using LLMs for coding in particular.

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DVCon Europe 2022. Verification, System Simulation, and People!

The 2022 DVCon (Design and Verification) Europe conference was back in physical form at its usual venue at the Holiday Inn München. It was a great conference, and just like at the 2022 DAC people were very happy to be back in person.

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Two Presentations at DVCON Europe 2022

DVCon (Design and Verification Conference) Europe is coming up in early December, in person, in München, Germany. The selection of papers and posters is finished, and the program is firming up. I am happy to report that I am part of two items on the menu, a personal record for DVCon! For more on DVCon Europe in general and how it has been in the past, see my previous blog post on DVCon Europe 2022.   

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The Mathworks Automotive Conference (MAC) 2022

The Mathworks Automotive Conference (MAC) 2022 was one-day vendor-specific conference about how Mathworks products can be/are used in the automotive sector. The set of companies represented was truly impressive. There were presentations from Lightyear, MAN, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Infineon, Toyota, Bosch, Continental, Real-Time Innovations, and of course the Mathworks themselves. It was a day well-spent listening to interesting talks. Here is my personal summary.

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DAC 2022 – Back in Person, Chiplets, an Award, and Much More

The 59th Design Automation Conference (DAC) took place in San Francisco, July 10-14, 2022.  As always, the DAC provided a great place to learn about what is going on in EDA. The DAC is really three events in one: there is an industry trade-show/exhibition, a research conference that is considered the premier in EDA, and an engineering track where practitioners present their work in a less formal setting.

I had two talks in the engineering track – one on the Intel device modeling language (which actually won the best presentation award in the embedded sub-track), and one on using simulation technology to build hardware software-first. 

The DAC was almost overwhelming in the richness of people and companies, but this blog tries to summarize the most prominent observations.

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SystemC Evolution Fika: Parallel SystemC

The SystemC Evolution Fika on April 7 had threading/parallelism as its theme. There were four speakers who presented various angles on how to parallelize SystemC models. The presentations and following discussion provided a variety of perspectives on threading as it can be applied in virtual platforms and other computer architecture simulations. It was pretty clear that the presenters and audience had quite different ideas about just what the target domain looks like and the best way to introduce parallelism to SystemC. Here is my take on what was said.

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