Month: April 2010

First Blog at Wind River!

One of the many nice effects of the Wind River acquisition of Simics is that I will be blogging as part of the Wind River Blog network. My first post there is up now, and it is a short (at least compared to a textbook, I admit it looks terribly long for a blog post) overview of how Simics works inside.

I think it is important for users of technologically advanced tools to know a bit of how they work. A classic example of this is compilers, where I taught an ESC class almost a decade ago which is my most popular piece of writing to date…

Eyjafjallajökull is Showing us Something

Wow. The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland and the resulting ashcloud has had an effect that I would never ever have expected. A near-total closing down of the European airspace is such a drastic thing to happen to nobody seems to have expected. It has certainly not been included in the list of worst-case scenarios to plan for in company and government contingency plans. Where does this leave us? In a very interesting situation indeed. Worst-case, we will have to do without air travel for months.

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FFast: Good Idea, Too Bad About the Implementation

I just read a short paper by Antoine Trouvé and Kazuaki Murakami from the RAPIDO 2010 workshop on “rapid simulation and performance evaluation”. The paper is “FFast: Efficient Application of Compiled Simulation Techniques To A Fast ISS Over a Virtual Machine”. It explores the interesting idea of how an existing virtual machine infrastructure can be used to build a fast instruction-set simulator, and in the extension, a full system simulator.

To me, this idea is worth exploring, since using a mature VM like the .net CLR (used in this paper) or a JVM would offer a shortcut to get high-quality code generation for a JIT compiler. It could also offer other benefits, as these environments support many advanced configuration and management features. I have touched on this topic before, in the posts “Dream ESL Language” (VM as the basis for a simulator) and “The JVM as Universal Parallel Glue” (that a common VM can  offer huge benefits for an ecosystem).

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Matt’s Today in History: System/360

I am a regular listener to the Matt’s Today in History podcast. When Matt asked for contributions for this spring (in order to meet a goal of 500 podcasts before Summer) I did give some thought to what I could contribute. Looking over some books, I found one suitable Spring date: the launch of the IBM System/360 back in 1964. The resulting podcast is now live at Matt’s Today in History.

Please be kind to any mistakes… I am trying to paint a broad picture for a computer-history-ignorant audience here.