Conquering Software with Software High-Level Synthesis

46daclogoThis post is a follow-up to the DAC panel discussion we had yesterday on how to conquer hardware-dependent software development. Most of the panel turned into a very useful dialogue on virtual platforms and how they are created, not really discussing how to actually use them for easing low-level software development. We did get to software eventually though, and had another good dialogue with the audience. Thanks to the tough DAC participants who held out to the end of the last panel of the last day!

As is often the case, after the panel has ended, I realized several good and important points that I never got around to making… and of those one struck me as worthy of a blog post in its own right.It is the issue of how high-level synthesis can help software design.

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The TLM DAC

46daclogoThe past few days here at DAC, a big theme has been transaction level modeling (TLM).

TLM is often considered to be SystemC TLM-2.0. Most of the statements from the EDA companies are to the effect that SystemC TLM-2.0 solves the problem of combining models from different sources. Scratching the surface of this happy picture, it is clear that it is not that simple…

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Immigration, Visas, and other Hassles

passport iconI have travelled to the United States more times than I care to remember now, starting back in 1997. Business tends to make me come here for the interesting, exciting, large events. Being here is usually a nice experience, but getting here is not. Apart from the bother of a 12-hour flight in economy class, there is the green form called I-W94.

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Off-Topic: Facebook in “English (Pirate)”

I admit to using Facebook more recently… I used to feel “what is the point”… but now I might be starting to see it. Anyway, a Facebook friend pointed out that you can set the UI to a language called “English (Pirate)”, which is pretty funny in use.

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Coding Horror on Big Iron Hardware

opinionIn a post from late June, Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror discusses the horrible cost of a large HP server (scaling up to 32 processor cores in eight AMD x86 sockets), compared to a bunch of simple single-socket basic servers. There are some interesting notes on relative costs of small-and-simple servers, including things like administration and power. There is an undercurrent to the post and the comments that the big HP machine is “overpriced”. I don’t think it is. If you have ever had Erik Hagersten as a teacher in computer architecture, you will know why.

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Off-Topic: Funny Map of the US

I found this very funny advertisement in an in-flight magazine recently, for the Norwegian business daily Dagens Næringsliv. To understand it, you probably need to know a Scandinavian language. Essentially, the message is that “reading DN contributes to a deeper understanding of the world”.

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Driving an Old Canon Scanner using a VM

lide30I have an old Canon LIDE 30 scanner that I purchased sometime late in 2003. At that time, it was connected to a PC running Windows XP, and drivers worked just fine. However, after I got my new computer in early 2009, with Vista 64, there are no more drivers available. There is a funny way around this though, using a virtual machine.

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Travel Topic: Linköping and Kolmården

visitlinkoping_logoHere comes another non-technical post about travel destinations, and this time we visited Linköping in south-east Sweden. Linköping is not a big tourist destination, rather a typical real city. We also went to Kolmården, the biggest Zoo in Sweden, which is “close” to Linköping, only some 70 km away. Continue reading “Travel Topic: Linköping and Kolmården”

StackOverflow interviews CouchDB

couchdbLast year, FLOSS Weekly interviewed Jan Lehnard of the CouchDB project. I put up a blog post on this, noting that it was interesting with a scalable parallel program written in Erlang, a true concurrent language. The interview was interesting,  but not very deeply technical. Now, almost a year later, the StackOverflow podcast, number 59, interviewed the founder of the project, Damien Katz. This interview goes a bit more into the technical details and what CouchDB is good for and what not, as well as some details on the use and performance of Erlang.

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DAC 2009 Panel and Paper

46daclogoThe 46th Design Automation Conference (DAC) is coming up in San Francisco in the US, last week of July. For me, this will be the first time I ever go to DAC. I have been to a couple of Design Automation and Test Europe  (DATE) conferences before, but DAC is supposedly even bigger as an event for the EDA and related communities. I have the honor to be on a panel this year, as well as co-authoring a paper on software validation.

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