Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
In a column called The Good News and the Bad News in IEEE Computer magazine (November 2007 issue), Prof. Wayne Wolf at Georgia Tech (and a regular columnist on embedded systems for Computer magazine) talks about the impact of multiprocessing systems (multicore, multichip) on embedded systems. In general, his tone is much more optimistic and upbeat than most pundits.
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Bill Murray of the “New Media Outlet” SCDsource has published one of the best articles that I have seen on the use of software simulators and virtual prototypes in industry. The examples in the article run from low-level code run on very accurate simulators all the way to very fast virtual systems that are used instead of actual hardware to train NASA operators. The article covers the end-user perspective and is not particularly oriented towards a particular vendor. It offers some nice insights into the expected and unexpected benefits that various companies have obtained from using simulators of various kinds. As well as some glimpses into the underlying technologies they have chosen, developed, and adapted.
Highly recommended.
The book “Multicore Programming – Increasing Performance through Software Multithreading” by Shameem Akhter and Jason Roberts is part of a series of books put out by Intel in their multicore software push. In case you have not noticed, Intel has a huge market push currently where they give seminars, publish articles and books, and give curricula to universities in order to get more parallel software in place. I read this book recently, and here is a short review.
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Via thinkingparallel.com I just found an interesting article from last Summer, about the actual non-imminence of the end of the computing world as we know it due to multicore. Written by Mark Nelson, the article makes some relevant and mostly correct claims, as long as we keep to the desktop land that he knows best. So here is a look at these claims in the context of embedded systems.
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Most of the time when talking about the impact of multicore processing on software, we complain that it makes the software more complicated because it has to cope with the additional complexities of parallelism. There are some cases, however, when moving to multicore hardware allows a software structure to be simplified. The case of Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) and the honestly idiotic design of the ARINC 653 standard is one such case.
Continue reading “When Multicore makes Things Simpler, like IMA”