Intel Blog – Page 2 – Observations from Uppsala

Intel Blog Post: Clear Linux for Simics Demo & Training

For Simics training and demo purposes, we often use Linux* running on the virtual platforms. In the early days of Simics and embedded Linux, we built our own minimal configurations by hand to run on simple target systems. Most recently, we changed our Linux default demo and training setup to use Clear Linux*. This change showed us just how sophisticated modern Linux setups are – which is good in general, but it also can make some low-level details more complicated.

I wrote an Intel Developer Zone Blog Post about our experience moving to Clear Linux for Simics demos and training, which contains a lot more details of what we observed and did to make this work for our purposes.

Intel Blog Post: Simics in the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge

The US Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) ran a “Cyber Grand Challenge” in 2016, where automated cyber-attack and cyber-defense systems were pitted against each other to drive progress in autonomous cyber-security. The competition was run on physical computers (obviously), but Simics was used in a parallel flow to check that competitors’ programs were not trying to undermine the infrastructure of the competition rather than compete fairly inside the rules of the competition.

Intel Blog Posts: Running Simics in Containers

Running Simics inside a container is a topic that has come up several times in recent years. In a two-part Intel Developer Zone blog post, my colleague Mambwe Mumbwa and I discuss both some background on container technology, how and how well Simics can run inside of containers, and what you can with containerized Simicses. Overall, containers offer a very good alternative to virtual machines for running programs like Simics, and the tool ecosystem opens up some exciting new ways to manage Simics installations and simulation instances.

Update: this post was extended to link to both part 1 and part 2 of the blog.

Intel Blog Post: Additional Notes on Temporal Decoupling

A few weeks ago, I talked about temporal decoupling in virtual platforms at DVCon Europe 2018. I just posted some additional notes on the topic temporal decoupling on my Intel blog. In this new blog post, I discuss some more aspects of temporal decoupling, and how it affects simulation semantics. I also explain some of the clever techniques used to minimize the impact of temporal decoupling on the software running on the virtual target system.

Update: The blog post is no longer available on the Intel site, instead it was reposted here on this blog to keep it available on the Internet.

Talking about Temporal Decoupling at DVCon Europe

This year’s Design and Verification Conference and Exhibition (DVCon Europe) takes place on October 24 and 25 (2018). DVCon Europe has turned into the best conference for virtual platform topics, and this year is no exception. There are some good talks coming!

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Intel Blog Post: Interview with Bengt Werner on the Early Days of Simics

Bengt Werner was one of the first people to work on the simulator that would become Simics, way back in 1992. On my Intel Blog, I published an interview with Bengt a while back where we discuss the early days of Simics and the original product vision and use cases.

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Intel Blog Post: The Simics Fulprompt, Fulöl, and Fuldans

I have a new blog post up at the Intel Developer Zone, this time about the Simics “fulprompt”. Every software team has its legends about spectacular mistakes, crazy users, and customer calls with strange questions. The Simics “fulprompt” is one example of this from the early days of Simics. It was a prompt that appeared where no prompt would normally appear, right in the middle of executing an instruction. As such, it was an ugly hack… and for Swedes who were around in the 1990s, the only name for a ugly hack is a fulhack.

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Intel Blog Post: Fault Injection in the Early Days of Simics

Injecting faults into systems and subjecting them to extreme situations at or beyond their nominal operating conditions is an important part of making sure they keep working even when things go bad. It was realized very early in the history of Simics (and the same observation had been made by other virtual platform and simulator providers) that using a virtual platform makes it much easier to provide cheap, reliable, and repeatable fault injection for software testing. In an Intel Developer Zone (IDZ) blog post, I describe some early cases of fault injection with Simics.

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Intel Blog Post: Simulation a Thousand Target Machines – in 2004 and 2018

Back in 2004, the startup Virtutech built a crazy demo for the 2004 Embedded Systems Conference (ESC). Back then, ESC was the place to be, and Virtutech was there with a battery of demos to blast the competition. The most interesting demo from a technology perspective was the 1002-machine network, as described in an Intel Developer Zone blog post of mine.

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Intel Blog Post: Running Large Workloads on Simics – in 1998 and 2018

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.

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Talking at the Embedded World 2018

I will be presenting an Exhibitor Forum talk at the Embedded World in Nürnberg next week, about how to get to Agile and small batches for embedded. Using simulation to get around the annoying hard aspect of hardware.

More details at https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2018/02/19/embedded-world-getting-agile-with-simulation

Intel Blog Post: Simulation in the Gartner Top Ten Tech Trends for 2018

There is a blog post out on my Intel Developer Zone blog where I take a look at the Gartner “Top Ten Tech Trends” for 2018. There are a couple of them where I found clear roles for the kinds of simulation tools we build in my little corner of Intel. In particular, Digital Twins is a concept that is all about simulation. To find the other trend where I found a big role for simulation, read the full blog post.

Intel Blog Post: Using Wind River® Simics® to Inspire Teachers and Researchers in Costa Rica

A while ago, I visited my Intel colleagues in Costa Rica and ran a workshop for university teachers and researchers, showing how Simics could be used in academia. I worked with a very smart and talented intern, Jose Fernando Molina, and after a rather long process I have published an interview with him on my Intel blog: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2017/12/05/windriver-simics-to-inspire-teachers-costarica

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Intel Blog Post: Looking at the Instruction Mix of Windows 10

In a previous Intel blog post “Question: Does Software Actually Use New Instruction Sets?” I looked at the kinds of instructions used by few different Linux setups, and how each setup was affected by changing the type of the processor it was running on (comparing Nehalem to Skylake). As a follow-up to that post, I have now done the same for Microsoft* Windows* 10. In the blog post, I take a look at how Windows 10 behaves across processor generations, and how its behavior compares to Ubuntu* 16 (they are actually pretty similar in philosophy).

Intel Blog: Question: Does Software Actually Use New Instruction Sets?

Over time, Intel and other processor core designers add more and more instructions to the cores in our machines. A good question is how quickly and easily new instructions added to an Instruction-Set Architecture (ISA) actually gets employed by software to improve performance and add new capabilities. Considering that our operating systems and programs are generally backwards-compatible, and run on all kind of hardware, can they actually take advantage of new instructions?

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