Been a while since I’ve written here – been avoiding writing about politics, which has obviously not been so great for me in the last couple of weeks… but now I have something else to ruminate on.
I have reached a milestone, or perhaps basecamp, in my PhD research: having a model for memory management that needs further exploration. (Hopefully there may even be a paper on this soon.)
Some of that exploration will have to be in hardware, and that’s really beyond me but I can and should build a software model to test how a many core system built using this new model might operate.
So far I have been testing or proving concepts with OVPSim but it does not allow me to build a true asynchronous multi-core model, so I need to do that in software myself.
But where to begin – I have a list of classes that you might want to have in C++:
- Computer – which would aggregate…
I hope you can see how quickly this becomes complex – and all we are talking about here is a simple software framework to allow me to do the research (ie., delivering the software, complex as it is, is only the very start.)
I am struggling to know where to begin – C++ seems like the logical choice for this, but it’s not proving to be much fun. Particularly because my CPU class has to be able to “execute” some code – I thought about using a DSL but may stick to the XML output I got from my hacked Valgrind Lackey – as at least I can then use existing XML engines.
Should I build from the XML up – eg., get a CPU class that can hack the XML and pass the requests up the chain (eg via the cache up to the Mesh and up to the DRAM etc), or what?
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 
3 responses to “Struggling”
I have trouble imaging a question to which XML is the right answer 🙂
What are you representing? Large datasets like memory reference traces probably need to be streamed in a binary form.
If you are trying to represent the structure of a computer system, there is a difference between a text rendering and a representation that can efficiently be operated upon. XML might be a (not so great) notation for the former.
It is a set of memory references as XML, some are code, others are reads, writes or modifies.
XML is extremely slow but there are engines out there that I can just link to process it and so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel – that’s been my perspective so far anyway.
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