Using Simulated Systems to Manage the Transition to Multicores and Multiprocessors
Technology trends are causing a paradigm shift in how computer systems are
designed: Instead of steadily getting faster single processors, the entire
semiconductor industry is turning to multicore and multiprocessor designs to
improve performance.
Future real-time and embedded systems will be using multicore processors,
and the software has to adapt to the situation. This will mean writing
multi-threaded software for symmetric, shared-memory multiprocessors. This
is known to be very difficult and fraught with unexpected problems, and now
shared-memory parallel programming is expected to go mainstream. The debug
problem is especially difficult in highly asynchronous concurrent
environments.
This talk will discuss how to debug software running on multicore and
multiprocessor hardware using full-system simulation with Virtutech Simics.
About Jakob Engblom
Jakob Engblom holds a PhD in computer systems from Uppsala university and
is currently a senior developer at Virtutech. He has been speaking about
embedded systems at university courses and industry trade shows for the past
five years. Jakob's professional interests include real-time systems,
embedded systems, embedded software development, simulation technology,
computer architecture, and compiler technology. He has authored more than 20
papers in the field of real-time and embedded systems (see www.engbloms.se).
From 2002 to 2005, he held a position as an adjunct professor at the
department of Information Technology at Uppsala university. Prior to
joining Virtutech, he was with IAR Systems.
