virtual platforms – Page 3 – Observations from Uppsala

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

Intel Blog Post: Shift-Left for a Snowy Ridge

There is a new blog post on the Intel Developer Zone on how we used Simics virtual platforms for the new Intel® Atom® P5900 series of system-on-chip (previously known as Snow Ridge). It talks about how shift-left works both inside of Intel and with our customers for the new chip, and the kinds of virtual platform models you use for different types of use cases.

See https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2020/03/17/seeing-the-early-snow-on-the-ridge

Intel Blog Post: Simulating Caches 10x Faster with Simics

Earlier this year, Arianna Delsante defended her Master’s Thesis in computer science at Uppsala University. Her thesis topic was to speed up cache and branch prediction simulation in Simics, and in the end she got a speed up of about 10x compared to previous implementations in Simics. I explain a bit more about cache simulation in fast functional simulators and what she did in my latest Intel Developer Zone Blog post, “Speeding-Up Cache Simulation in Simics by 10x“.

Intel Blog: A Mountain and Threading for Simics 6

A new short blog post on my Intel Developer Zone blog talks about the improved threading simulation core we have added in Simics version 6… and about how a colleague of mine climbed to the top of the highest mountain in Europe and showed a flag with our new Simics icon! Read the story at https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2019/09/10/simics-6-at-the-mountain-top.

Intel Blog: Simics 6 Device Register Coverage

I have a new blog post out on the Intel Developer Zone, about the Simics 6 device register coverage feature. I use device register coverage to look at how different operating systems use the same hardware. The differences are significant, demonstrating the (rather expected) observation that different software stacks use the same hardware in different ways.

SAMOS 2019 – Insights, Mechanisms, Heterogeneity, and more

Earlier in July 2019, I had the honor of presenting one of the keynote talks at the 19^th SAMOS (International Conference on Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, MOdeling, and Simulation) conference, held on the island of Samos in Greece. When I got the invite, I had no real idea what to expect. I asked around a bit and people said it was a good conference with a rather special vibe. I think that is a very good description of the conference: a special vibe. In addition to the usual papers and sessions, there is a strong focus on community and social events, fostering discussion across academic disciplines and between industry and academia. There were many really great discussions in addition to the paper and keynote presentations, and overall it was one of the most interesting conferences I have been to in recent years.

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.

DAC 2019 – Cloud, a Book, an Award, and More

Last week was spent at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Las Vegas. I had a presentation and poster in the Designer/IP track about Clouds, Containers, and Virtual Platforms , and worked in the Intel Simulation Solutions booth at the show floor. The DAC was good as always, meeting many old friends in the industry as well as checking out the latest trends in EDA (hint: same trends as everywhere else). One particularly nice surprise was a book (the printed type, not the Vegas “book” that means something else entirely).

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.

Embedded World 2019

The Embedded World in Nürnberg is still going strong as the best tradeshow for “Embedded” in the world. This year, I spent time doing booth duty and gave a talk in the Conference part of the event. There was an unusual high number of old friends and business acquaintances around, and it was a great experience overall with many fruitful discussions and connections for the future. However, it seems that there is always something that goes slightly awry with my travel to the show…