Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
Back in 2004, the startup Virtutech built a crazy demo for the 2004 Embedded Systems Conference (ESC). Back then, ESC was the place to be, and Virtutech was there with a battery of demos to blast the competition. The most interesting demo from a technology perspective was the 1002-machine network, as described in an Intel Developer Zone blog post of mine.
Continue reading “Intel Blog Post: Simulation a Thousand Target Machines – in 2004 and 2018”
I 
will be presenting an Exhibitor Forum talk at the Embedded World in Nürnberg next week, about how to get to Agile and small batches for embedded. Using simulation to get around the annoying hard aspect of hardware.
More details at https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2018/02/19/embedded-world-getting-agile-with-simulation
I read some news (ExtremeTech, Techcrunch) about how “smart” wifi-connected locks sold by Lockstate got bricked by an automatic over-the-network update. This sounds bad – but it is bad for a good reason. I think the company should be lauded for actually having the ability – and laughed out for royally botching it.
Continue reading “Smart Locks Bricked by Bad Update? The Right Approach!”
On my Intel Software Evangelist blog, I just published an updated version of an interview I first published back in May, about how to use Intel CoFluent Studio for IoT system architecture. This is a really cool story, about how you can use a calibrated simulation model to architect and analyze software performance before actually writing the code! I
This really happened last week, but I was in the US for the DAC then. I did another blog on Intel Software blog, about a white paper that Wind River put out about how they use Simics internally. The white paper is a really good set of examples of how Simics can be used for software development, test, and debug – regardless of how old or new the hardware is. It also touches my favorite topic of IoT simulation and scaling up – Wind River is actually using Simics for 1000+ node tests of IoT software! Read on at https://blogs.intel.com/evangelists/2016/06/06/wind-river-uses-simics-test-massive-iot-networks/
Even though I am now working for Intel, the nice folks at Wind River have let me do blogging on the Wind River blog as a guest anyway. I first blogged about the fantastic world of simulators that I have found inside Intel, and now a longer technical piece has appeared on a use of Intel CoFluent Studio. I interviewed Sangeeta Ghangam at Intel, who used CoFluent Studio to model the behavior of a complex software load on a gateway, connected to a set of sensor nodes. It is rather different from the very concrete software execution I work on with Simics. Being able to model and estimate the performance and cost and size of systems before you go to the concrete implementation is an important part of software and systems architecture, and CoFluent offers a neat tool for that.
Read the full story on the Wind River blog!
Thanks to the good folks at Vector Software, I was pointed to a conference recording on Youtube, from the Google Test Automation Conference (GTAC) 2015 (Youtube video). The recording covers quite a few talks, but at around 4 hours 38 minutes, Brian Gogan describes the testing used for the Chromecast product. This offers a very cool insight into how networked consumer systems are being tested at Google. Brian labels the Chromecast as an “Internet of Things” device*, and pitches his talk as being about IoT testing. While I might disagree about his definition of IoT, he is definitely right that the techniques presented are applicable to IoT systems, or at least individual devices.
Continue reading “Google ”IoT” Testing for Chromecast: Cloud Emulation + Physical Gear”
On November 3, 2015, I will give a presentation at the Embedded Conference Scandinavia about simulating IoT systems. The conference program can be found at http://www.svenskelektronik.se/ECS/ECS15/Program.html, with my session detailed at http://www.svenskelektronik.se/ECS/ECS15/Program/IoT%20Development.html.
My topic is how to realistically simulate very large IoT networks for software testing and system development. This is a fun field where I have spent significant time recently. Only a couple of weeks ago, I tried my hand simulating a 1000-node network. Which worked! I had 1000 ARM-based nodes running VxWorks running at the same time, inside a single Simics process, and at speeds close to real time! It did use some 55GB of RAM, which I think is a personal record for largest use of system resources from a single process. Still, it only took a dozen processors to do it.
I had the great honor to be on a panel discussing IoT Security at the DAC back in June. The panel was part of the Embedded Techcon event that took place essentially as a little embedded corner inside the DAC – it was held in a couple of conference rooms next to the regular DAC sessions, and attendees were also mostly attending the DAC in general. Not a bad idea for meshing embedded and hardware design. The panel was a great one, and David Kleidermacher from Blackberry gave me a great take-away: unless security is allowed to gate releases of products, it is hard to think you take security seriously.
Continue reading “Security for IoT Panel at the DAC 2015 – Can Security Gate your Release?”
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how Simics is used to simulate large wireless networks for IoT (Internet-of-Things) applications.
It is funny for me to be back at the IoT game. A decade ago (time flies, doesn’t it?), at Virtutech, I and Johan Runeson took part in an EU research project on exactly this topic. Unfortunately, we had to back out of that project due to economic circumstances and failing management commitment, but we still learnt a few things that were relevant now that we are back in the IoT game. In particular, how to simulate wireless networks in a reasonable way in a transaction-level simulator. Thus, payback for the investment took 10 years to arrive, but it did arrive. To me, that underscores the need to be a bit speculative, take some risk, and try to explore the future.