Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
The time has come to do something new. I am leaving Intel (and the Intel Simics team) at the end of September (2024). After more than twenty years with the team and the product this is a big step into the unknown. But when Intel offered a “retirement” package as part of its current round of cost reduction measures, I felt that it was a golden opportunity to find something new to do.
Continue reading “Time to Do Something New”
Wind River is celebrating their 40th anniversary as a company with a series of historical look-backs posted on the Wind River channel on YouTube. One of the videos is an interview with Jerry Fiddler who founded Wind River back in 1981, by Wind River current CEO Kevin Dallas. Jerry Fiddler talks about how he got started in computers, and especially about how Wind River got started and grew. It is both a fantastic set of historical anecdotes and some solid product management and strategy insights.
Continue reading “Jerry Fiddler on the Early Days of Wind River and Building a Product”
There are still some articles being published that I wrote while at Wind River. The latest is a piece on just what you could do with a lab in cloud – in particular, a lab based on virtual platforms like Simics. Eva Skoglund at Wind River and I wrote this together, and it is a nice high-level summary of why you really need to have a virtual cloud-based lab if you are doing embedded systems development. It is published in the online European magazine Electropages.
Continue reading “Article on Cloud-Based Virtual Labs and Why you Want Them”
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.
I just posted a short blog post on the Wind River blog, introducing a video demo of the Web API to Wind River Helix Lab Cloud. In the post and video, I show how the Lab Cloud Web API works. For someone familiar with REST-style APIs, this is probably baby-level, but for me and probably most of our user base, it is something new and a rather interesting style for an API. Thus, doing a video that shows the first few steps of authentication and getting things going seems like a good idea.
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.
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about the Simics Agent feature that we included in Simics last year. Took a while to get a blog out, as I had so many other things to write about. It was also nice to get a video demo out to accompany the post. The most interesting part about the Simics Agent to me is how much more convenient it is to script a target with an agent on the inside. Too bad that also changes the target software stack a bit — but I do think that that is OK most of the time. As always, the solution has to be designed with the end goal in mind, and there is no absolute right or wrong here. Read the blog post for more details!
During my vacation, a blog post went up on the Wind River blog with an interview with Hyungmin Cho, a researcher at Stanford. Hyungmin has done some seriously heavy and cool work with Simics, using it together with a circuit-level simulator to investigate error resiliency in hardware devices, and how errors propagate from hardware into the software. As part of this process, he has setup an automated test system using Simics, and this system has done more than a million automated Simics runs. That is an insane number – I have been using Simics for twelve years now, and if I had used it every day for all these years, I would have had to start 10 runs per hour, every hour of the day. It shows the power of automation along with parallel runs on clusters of machines – once the setup is automated, you can pour on the volume.
Continue reading “Wind River Blog: A Million Simics Runs (and lots of cool technology)”
There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about some computing history. Wind River turns thirty this year, Simics twenty, and simulation for debug (and probably debug in general) turns sixty. Computing has come a long way.
Last week, I posted a discussion about fault injection in virtual systems, using Basil Fawlty as the perfect example of a fault injection agent.
I have a post at my Wind River blog, about the difference between virtual and physical systems. The key idea is this:
Comparing virtual and physical systems is like comparing apples and apples, not apples and oranges: while apples are mostly interchangeable, they is certainly variation between them. Some apples are best for eating, some are better for making sauce, some are pie material, and some are best for fermenting cider. The type you select depends on what you want to cook. The difference between physical and virtual hardware is similar: they can be used as replacements for each other to some extent, but the connoisseur can make much better use of both by looking at the differences.
Go there now and read i!