Recently in Embedded Computing Category

With the news today that AOL is to hire another 20 software engineers (They hired 50 in June) and the fact that Amazon are looking for Java developers, I am still surprised that the interest in software development and ICT at a national level is still quiet muted. In a economy with rising unemployment students should consider a rewarding and challenging career with good prospects in software development. This includes a myriad of domains such as enterprise, sustainable energy, embedded systems etc.

 

Houston Neal at electrical estimating software advice has a great article about the potential work out there in America for electricians who can provide technology to assist in the reduction of energy for homes and businesses.

Yesterday m Navigon 7210 could not find any satellites. Despite several reboots it i not remedy the problem. I eventually resorted to a factory reset and it fixed the issue. The sat nav seems to be responding in a more efficient manner since.

I have a simple vision. We want to watch RTE's player on our television in the living room. You can buy televisions with DLNA capabilities and you can buy other televisions that have yahoo widget support. But at the moment you can't buy a television with a web browser built in.

If you were to tell me that a pico projector that uses laser technology and is the size of a mobile phone will be incorporated into all mobile phones and laptops by 2015. I would probably have a hard job believing you.

Up until now we had to worry about if the TV was 1080p i.e. High Def. Now we have to consider LED tech and if the TV has its own built in web browser or is it just a glorified media client that will only connect to a select few websites. The demand for network over power lines adapters is going to soar we demand jitter free network performance. Companies such as Sony and LG are releasing new products which have this technology. I am waiting for one that will not tie me down to a certain source or streaming media server

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Robert Scoble has an excellent article about Liam Casey "Mr China", he outlines how Liam is redefining the traditional supply chain and offers food for thought on how the design and supply of new tech will change.

http://scobleizer.com/2008/11/12/disruptive-factories/

Embedded.com report on the intensfied efforts by industry to develop a robust but practical multicore programmng model. .

Multicore means multiple processors which mean multiple migraines if you are a developer as you have to try and taken a sequential task and break it out into parrallel jobs. Graphic card companies have been doing this for the past 10 - 15 years and they realise the complexitiies involved. The processing of data streams has been the focus of research for the past 8 - 10 years. The advent of Network processors in the late 90s kick started some of this research as these units had (and still do) multiple processing engines. Processors such as Intel IXP1200 (which was the focus of my PhD research) featured 6 Risc Microengines for header processing. Dedictaed SRAM, SDRAM , Receive and Tranmsit register sets.

In the United States, Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have awarded an estimated $10 million, five-year grant to help fund a new Parallel Computing Lab at the University of California at Berkeley, with 14 faculty members initially involved. As many as 20 universities, including MIT, Stanford and the University of Illinois, competed for funding.

My research into how we could improve performance pointed towards the fact that Multicore on its own will not be the solution. Programming in parrallel is a black art and often trial and error will determine the best solutuion. What I discovered was that if you build a good cycle accurate s/w model of the problem domain and use evolutionary algorithms and local search methods you can explore a vast number of permutations of chip architectiure. This approach can be ,mapped to the programming issue as you can instruct the model to use a variety of functions and routines as appropiate. The process of evolution will then produce a pareto curve of possible solutions. The results from my research highlighted architectural considerations that an engineer at first glance would not normally consider but the performance figures justified the configuration. This approach to multicore programming will only work if parameter driven cycle accurate simiulators of the problem domain are available. I built my own using POOSL and it took me 3 years. Manufactuters siuch as Intel and AMD need to provide these open models to the developer community. Using these models we can then further explore how mulitcore programming models can exploit these architectures. The development of these multicore frameworks should use as mny different techniques as possible., EA and local search are ideal candidates to assist in this exploration and development.

Bonus Link - A copy of the presentation I presented at ANCS 2006 on my work