Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
The first chapter of mine and Daniel Aarno’s book Software and System Development Using Virtual Platforms can be downloaded from the Wind River Blog or the Elsevier Scitechconnect blog.
The purpose of the free chapter is to provide a way to understand the style of the book – and hopefully lead people on to buy the whole thing to read it.
The paperback edition looks really nice, and the printed copies that I have had the honor to get have been very well made.
At the Wind River corporate blog, there is a blog post that I wrote about continuous integration and Simics. At the Elsevier Computer Science Connect blog, there is also a blog post about continuous integration and Simics that I wrote. These two texts are essentially the same, and I had the good fortune to get it posted in multiple places. The reason it is up at Elsevier is to help promote our soon-to-be-released book at about virtual platforms and simulation (and a little bit about Simics), and hopefully we will reach a larger audience with both messages: CI with Simics is a great idea, and the book is a great book to buy.
I just found and read an old text in the computer systems field, “Why Do Computers Fail and What Can Be Done About It?” , written by Jim Gray at Tandem Computers in 1985. It is a really nice overview of the issues that Tandem had encountered in their customer based, back in the early 1980s. The report is really a classic in the computer systems field, but I did not read it until now. Tandem was an early manufacturer of explicitly fault tolerant and highly reliable and available computers. In this technical report Jim Gray describes the basic principles of fault tolerance, and what kinds of faults happen in the field and that need to be tolerated.