When I recently turned 50, a friend of mine gave me a book that was about as old as me – Timesharing System Design Concepts, by Richard W Watson. The copyright date is 1970, but the publishing date found online 1971. The book covers the hardware support and software techniques needed to provide multiple users with simultaneous access to a computer system. Typically, using remote teletype terminals. It is a wonderful book, reflecting on the state of computer technology around 1970. It shows both how many of the basic concepts we still use today were already in use back then, but at the same time just how far we have evolved computing since.
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CACM on DSAs
The July 2020 edition of the Communications of the ACM (CACM) had a front-page theme of “Domains-Specific Hardware Accelerators”, or DSAs. It contained two articles about the subject, one about an academic genomics accelerator, and one about the Google TPU. Hardware accelerators dedicated to particular types of computation are basically everywhere today, and an accepted part of the evolution of computers. The CACM articles have some good tidbits and points about how accelerators are designed and used today. At the same time, I also found a youtube talk about the first hardware accelerator, the IBM Stretch HARVEST, showing both contrasts with today as well as a remarkable continuity in concept.
Continue reading “CACM on DSAs”SAMOS 2019 – Insights, Mechanisms, Heterogeneity, and more
Earlier in July 2019, I had the honor of presenting one of the keynote talks at the 19th SAMOS (International Conference on Embedded Computer Systems: Architectures, MOdeling, and Simulation) conference, held on the island of Samos in Greece. When I got the invite, I had no real idea what to expect. I asked around a bit and people said it was a good conference with a rather special vibe. I think that is a very good description of the conference: a special vibe. In addition to the usual papers and sessions, there is a strong focus on community and social events, fostering discussion across academic disciplines and between industry and academia. There were many really great discussions in addition to the paper and keynote presentations, and overall it was one of the most interesting conferences I have been to in recent years.
Continue reading “SAMOS 2019 – Insights, Mechanisms, Heterogeneity, and more”Intel Blog Post: The More the Merrier – Integration and Virtual Platforrms
Integration is hard, that is well-known. For computer chip and system-on-chip design, integration has to be done pre-silicon in order to find integration issues early so that designs can be updated without expensive silicon re-spins. Such integration involves a lot of pieces and many cross-connections, and in order to do integration pre-silicon, we need a virtual platform.
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David May on Multicore: Heterogeneity not Needed
Via the EETimes, I found a very interesting talk by Bristol professor David May, presented at the 4th Annual Bristol Multicore Challenge, in June of 2013. The talk can be found as a Youtube movie here, and the slides are available here. The EETimes focused on the idea to cut down ARM to be really RISC, but I think the more interesting part is Professor May’s observations on multicore computing in general, and the case for and against heterogeneity in (parallel) computers.
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SiCS Multicore Day 2012
The 2012 edition of the SiCS Multicore Day was fun, like they have always been in the past. I missed it in 2010 and 2011, but could make it back this year. It was interesting to see that the points where keynote speakers disagreed was similar to previous years, albeit with some new twists. There was also a trend in architecture, moving crypto operations into the core processor ISA, that indicates another angle on the hardware accelerator space.
Nvidia “Kal-El” Variable SMP
Nvidia recently announced that their already-known “Kal-El” quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 SoC actually contains five processor cores, not just four as a “normal” quad-core would. They call the architecture “Variable SMP”, and it is a pretty smart design. The one where you think, “I should have thought of that”, which is the best sign of something truly good.
MCC 2009 Presentations Online
The presentations from the 2009 Swedish Workshop on Multicore Computing (MCC 2009) are now online at the program page for the workshop. Let me add some comments on the workshop per se.
Freescale P4080, in Physical Form
Past Tuesday, I attended the Freescale Design With Freescale (DWF) one-day technology event in Kista, Stockholm. This is a small-scale version of the big Freescale Technology Forum, and featured four tracks of talks running from the morning into the afternoon. All very technical, aimed at designing engineers.
SiCS Multicore Day 2009
Last Friday, I attended this year’s edition of the SiCS Multicore Day. It was smaller in scale than last year, being only a single day rather than two days. The program was very high quality nevertheless, with keynote talks from Hazim Shafi of Microsoft, Richard Kaufmann of HP, and Anders Landin of Sun. Additionally, there was a mid-day three-track session with research and industry talks from the Swedish multicore community. Continue reading “SiCS Multicore Day 2009”
Cavium Octeon II: Short Notes
About two months ago, Cavium Networks launched their second generation of Octeon chips, the Octeon II. The most obvious difference to the previous generation (Octeon, Octeon Plus) is a new MIPS64 core with much better support for hypervisors and virtualization. There are some other interesting aspects to this chip, though.
When does Hardware Acceleration make Sense in Networking?
Yes, when does hardware acceleration make sense in networking? Hardware acceleration in the common sense of “TCP offload”. This question was answered by a very nicely reasoned “no” in an article by Mike Odell in ACM Queue called “Network Front-End Processors, Yet Again“.
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EETimes.com – Multicore CPUs face slow road in comms
The EETimes article Multicore CPUs face slow road in comms piqued my interest. There is an interesting chart in there about just how slow more-than-one-core processors will be in penetrating a vaguely defined “comms” market place. I can believe that, but I think their comments on the PowerQUICC series require some commentary…
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SiCS Multicore Days: The Debate Points
It is a week ago now, and sometimes it is good to let impressions sink in and get processed a bit before writing about an event like the SiCS Multicore Days. Overall, the event was serious fun, and I found the speakers very insightful and the panel discussion and audience questions added even more information.
Kunle Olukotun Interview: Heterogeneity, Domain-Specific Programming
The Radio Register has a nice interview with Kunle Olukotun, the man most known for the Afara/Sun Niagara/UltraSparc T1-2-etc. design. It is a long interview, lasting well over an hour, but it is worth a listen. A particular high point is the story on how Kunle worked on parallel processors in the mid-1990s when everyone else was still chasing single-thread performance. He really was a very early proponent of multicore, and saw it coming a bit before most other (general-purpose) computer architects did. Currently, he is working on how to program multiprocessors, at the Stanford Pervasive Parallelism Laboratory (PPL). In the interview, I see several themes that I have blogged about before being reinforced…
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