This is a short story from the world of virtual platforms. It is about how hard – or easy – it is to model a simple and well-defined hardware behavior that turns out to mercilessly expose the limitations of simulation kernels.
Continue reading “The Event at the End of Universe”Tag: hardware modeling
Intel Blog: Open-Sourcing the Device Modeling Language
The Device Modeling Language (DML) that we have used with Simics since 2005 is now available in open source! Some more details and examples of what DML looks like can be found in an Intel blog post.
Wind River Blog: Interview with Intel Users of Simics
Intel is a big Simics user, but most of the time Intel internal use of Simics is kept internal. However, we recently had the chance to interview Karthik Kumar and Thomas Willhalm of Intel about how they used Simics to interact with external companies and improve Intel hardware designs. The interview is found on the Wind River blog network.
It is also my last blog post written at Wind River; since January 18, I am working at Intel. I am working on ways to keep publishing texts about Simics and simulation, but the details are not yet clear.
Wind River Blog: Using Lab Cloud to Communicate Hardware Setups to Software Developers
In a blog post at Wind River, I describe how the Wind River Helix Lab Cloud system can be used to communicate hardware design to software developers. The idea is that you upload a virtual platform to the cloud-based system, and then share it to the software developers. In this way, there is no need to install or build a virtual platform locally, and the sender has perfect control over access and updates. It is a realization of the hardware communication principles I presented in an earlier blog post on use cases for Lab Cloud.
But the past part is that the targets I talk about in the blog post and use in the video are available for anyone! Just register on Lab Cloud, and you can try your own threaded software and check how it scales on a simulated 8-core ARM!
EETimes: James Aldis on Performance Modeling
James Aldis of TI has published an article in the EEtimes about how Texas Instruments uses SystemC in the modeling of their OMAP2 platform. SystemC is used for early architecture modeling and performance analysis, but not really for a virtual platform that can actually run software. The article offers a good insight into the virtual platform use of hardware designers, which is significantly different from the virtual platform use of software designers.
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Modeling Endianness
Endianness is a topic in computer architecture that can give anyone a headache trying to understand exactly what is happening and why. In the field of computer simulation, it is a pervasive problem that takes some thinking to solve in an efficient, composable, and portable way.
This blog post describes how I am used to working with endianness in virtual platforms, and why this approach makes sense to me. There are other ways of dealing with endianness, with different trade-offs and overriding goals.
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Software, Hardware, and Development Methods
I just read an opinion-provoking piece “Software developer attitudes: just get on with it” by Frank Schirrmeister, as well as the article “Life imitating art: Hardware development imitating software development” by Glenn Perry that he linked to. Both these articles touch on the long-standing question of who does development the “best” in computing. I have heard these arguments many times, where software developers think that there is something mythical about hardware development that makes things work so much better with much fewer bugs, and hardware people looking at the speed of development and fanciful fireworks of coding that software engineers can do. It could be a case of the grass always looking greener on the other side… but there are some concrete things that are relevant here.
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