A Hardware-Software Symbiosis

Roland Piquepaille writes "We all want smaller and faster computers. Of course, this increases the complexity of the work of computer designers. But now, computer scientists from the University of Virginia are coming with a radical new idea which may revolutionize computer design. They've developed Tortola, a virtual interface that enables hardware and software to communicate and to solve problems together. This approach can be applied to get a better performance from a specific system. It also can be used in the areas of security or power consumption. And it soon could be commercialized with the help of IBM and Intel."

Re:NoROLAND NOROLAND NOROLAND

[bigtangringo]

Why the Roland hate? Many of the stories he submits are valid, interesting stories.

The stories he submits link directly to the article, it's only his submitter link that goes to his blog. I rarely, if ever, look at who submitted the article.

If he somehow profits from submitting articles I'm interested in reading, more power to him.

hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember something like this being talked about by my teacher 3 years ago. About how software could show down parts of the CPU to save power. It could also change the way the CPU worked on the fly.

"We could use the software to hide flaws in the hardware, which would allow designers to release products sooner because problems could be fixed later," translation -> Hardware companies can produce shit and if someone happens to notice a flaw we can create a patch instead of testing our products first. Will this not also open the hardware up to a virus?

Doesn't sound like such a good thing to me

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

Hazelwood cites a famous Intel mishap where microprocessors were distributed before a flaw in their fine mathematics function was detected, resulting in a massive recall. A system like Tortola could prevent such expensive glitches in the future. "We could use the software to hide flaws in the hardware, which would allow designers to release products sooner because problems could be fixed later," explains Hazelwood.

Oh great. So not only do the public get to be unwitting beta testers for software but we'll soon be able to do it for hardware too.

I can't wait to pay £400 for a Beta CPU and then get to endure 6 months of crashing until it gets patched.

BS again....

[gweihir]

Sorry, but Hardware and software do not solve problems together. That is straight from the "computers are magic"-fraction. Hardware solves problems under software control. Hardware alone can do nothing and software alone cannot run.

Using inferface layers to get more portable and easier to use interfaces is an old and well-established technique.

There people are looking for money, right? Why does /. provide free advertizing to them?

CCS

[diablovision]

This article is an example of CCS: "Cute Chick Science". The article has about as much fluff as a popcorn kernel. I am not exactly sure to what they are referring here--FPGAs? There seem to be a number of statements that are overly categorical and seemingly not well informed such as "This middle layer would allow software to adapt to the hardware it's running on, something engineers have not been able to do in the past," and "to engineer software that can communicate between the two layers, [hardware and software]".

If there wasn't a pic of a cute professor involved, would anyone care?

Hardware signalling and code re-ordering

[skeptictank]

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~hazelwood/tortola/pape rs/islped04.pdf [virginia.edu]

When the hardware detects a problem it signals the software. The software knows the location of the problematic code by checking a "last executed branch" register. A dynamic optimizer(software) then re-orders the code in that region and caches it to be used in future passes through that section.

The trick will be getting the dynamic optimizer light-weight enough that it doesn't induce performance hits in and of itself. Also, as an above poster noted, re-ordering code on the fly is fraught with peril. It seems this could have application in general purpose laptops, cellphones, and other non-safety critical gadgets. There should definitely be a bit in the machine control register to switch off the optimizer.