computer simulation technology – Observations from Uppsala

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.

Notes from our DVCon Europe 2022 Tutorial

I presented a tutorial about the “verification of virtual platforms models” at DVCon Europe last week. The tutorial was prepared by me and Ola Dahl at Ericsson, but Ola unfortunately could not attend and present his part – so I had to learn his slides and style and do my best to be an Ola stand-in (tall order, we really missed you there Ola!). The title maybe did not entirely describe the contents – it was more a discussion around how to think about correctness and in particular specifications vs implementations. The best part was the animated discussion that we got going in the room, including some new insights from the audience that really added to the presented content.

Updated: Included an important point on software correctness that I forgot in the first publication.

Elektroniktidningen Magazine Article about DML

The November 2022 on-paper magazine from Swedish electronics news site Elektroniktidningen features an article I wrote about the Device Modeling Language (DML). Among many other really good articles.

Update: The article is now available online in HTML format.

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.

Intel Blog: Catching a Tricky Bug by Running Simics on Simics

I recently published a long post on the Intel Community Blog, talking about how my colleague Evgeny solved a nicely complicated bug using Simics-on-Simics. The bug involved UEFI, an operating system, SMM, SMI, and virtualization. Just another day in the office (or more like a year, given how long it took to get this one resolved).

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.

Some Notes on Temporal Decoupling (Reposted)

This blog post was originally posted at Intel back in 2018, but it has since been retired from the Intel blog system. As it is of general interest (in my opinion), here is a reposting (with a few small updates here and there).

Temporal decoupling is a key technology in virtual platforms, and can speed up the execution of a system by several orders of magnitude. In my own experiments, I have seen it provide a speedup of more than 1000x. Here, I will dig a little deeper into temporal decoupling and its semantic effects.

DVCon Europe 2021 – Testbenches, AI, and Open Source

Just like in 2020, the Design and Verification Conference (DVCon) Europe 2021 was a virtual conference. It took place from October 26 to 27, with the SystemC Evolution day on October 28 (as usual). As has been the case in recent years, the verification side of the conference is significantly larger than the design side. This is common with the other DVCon conferences in the world. In this blog, I will go through my main observations from DVCon Europe, and share some notes from some of the presentations.

Presenting a Simics Tutorial at DVCon Europe (2021)

DVCon Europe is coming up in late October. This year, I am going to present a tutorial on using the public release of the Intel Simics Simulator to model a PCIe-attached accelerator subsystem. It is fun to be back speaking at the DVCon, after a couple of years of not having talked at the conference. DVCon Europe is a virtual event this year too due to Covid.

DRAMsys – Cycle-Accurate Simulation using Transactions

DRAMsys is a simulator for modern RAM systems, built by researchers at Fraunhofer IESE and the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. Over the past few years, I have heard several talks about the tool and also had the luck to talk a bit to the team behind it. It is an interesting piece of simulation technology, in particular for how it manages to build a truly cycle-accurate model on top of the approximately-timed (AT) style defined SystemC TLM-2.0.

DVCon Europe 2020 – Developing Hardware like Software?

The Design and Verification Conference Europe (DVCon Europe) took place back in late October 2020. In a normal year, we would add “in München, Germany” to the end of that sentence. But that is not how things were done in 2020. Instead, it was a virtual conference with world-wide attendance. Here are my notes on what I found the most interesting from the conference (for various reasons, this text did come out with a bit of delay).

Intel Blog: How Teaching Users Drives Product Improvements in Simics

I have a post out on the Intel Software blog about my experience developing and delivering training for Simics over the past few years. A key observation is that building training is a great way to test the product, and drives changes and improvements in the product. The blog is found at https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/teaching-users-drives-product-improvements-in-simics-sw.html

The Virtual DAC 2020

I have attended the Design Automation Conference (DAC) occasionally for the past decade – maybe every second or third year. The DAC is typically mostly about the lower levels and the backend of hardware design, but there is always something to learn about virtual platforms and related topics closer to my interests. This year, like last year, I got a presentation (and poster) accepted for the Designer track. The DAC organizers held out hope for a physical conference for quite a while (back in early March it seemed rather unlikely that this would still be with us in July…). However, a physical conference was not to be, and the DAC switched to a virtual format in early May.

Adjusting to Work-from-Home: Remote Live Simics Training

In the current world-wide lockdown due to Covid-19, many things that were done in-person in the past have to become virtual. The Simics® New User Training that we run at Intel and with our customers and partners is no different. In normal times, we run in-person classes around the world, but that is not an option right now. Thus, we shifted to running remote live classes as a substitute for the time being. This blog shares some of my experience from running remote live classes.

We changed the cover page of the Simics training to symbolize the change.

Intel Blog Post: “Quit Thinking and Look” – Mea Culpa Chasing a Performance Bug

I have written before about the debug advice to “Quit thinking and look.” It means that you should not form conclusions prematurely. Stop and look at what is going on instead of guessing and cooking up theoretical scenarios. Sound advice that I completely failed to follow in the case that I just chronicled on my Intel Blog: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2020/03/18/quit-thinking-and-look-chasing-simics-performance