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alphaWorks : IBM Full-System Simulator for the Cell Broadband Engine Processor : Overview

What is the Full-System Simulator for the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) Processor?

In 2001, Sony, Toshiba, and IBM combined research and development efforts to create an advanced processor and system architecture for a new wave of devices in the emerging broadband era. As a result, the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (CBEA) was designed in order to take advantage of IBM's most advanced semiconductor process technologies and to deliver high performance with good power efficiency.

Shortly after project inception, Sony, Toshiba, and IBM engaged the IBM Austin Research Laboratory to develop an IBM Full-System Simulator model for the processor and system architecture that would support software simulation and performance testing. Internally referred to as "Mambo," the simulator delivered vital feedback at various stages of the Cell BE project life cycle. An initial, functional simulation model was developed based on design specifications for preliminary validation, then validated against hardware-level simulators, and finally correlated with real hardware. The result was a completely integrated working system of Cell BE hardware and software that has been successfully launched alongside actual hardware delivery. The IBM Full-System Simulator for the Cell BE Processor enables development teams both within and outside IBM to simulate a Cell BE system in order to develop and enhance application support for this platform.

How does it work?

Written in C, a significant part of the Full-System Simulator's simulation capability is directly attributed to its simulation multitasking framework component. Developed as a robust, high-performance alternative to conventional process and thread programming, the multitasking framework is a lightweight, multitasking scheduling framework that provides a complete set of facilities for creating and scheduling threads, manipulating time delays, and applying a variety of interthread communication policies and mechanisms to simulation events.

In the multitasking framework's multithreaded approach, individually-schedulable threads are created in order to simulate a component or collection of components. If a thread must defer processing, it requests to be blocked and continues execution when awakened. Any local (stack) state is preserved in order to mitigate the necessity for allocating areas for saving and restoring this state. Multitasking framework threads are non-preemptive; they block only on well-defined events. The multitasking framework simplifies access to shared data that must otherwise be serialized in order to guarantee correct behavior. Each thread has an associated priority. Scheduling and resource allocations are all "first-come, first-served" (FCFS) within priority. The multitasking framework also includes software components useful for modeling common hardware components such as gates, latches, and ports.

This low-level simulation infrastructure is complemented with a host of additional features, such as integrated development and debugging tools, support for stand-alone and operating system boot, data collection and analysis frameworks, performance visualization, and tracing and logging capabilities that enable developers to realistically represent an entire system of equipment, devices, or subsystems and simulate not only the instructions executed by the processor core, but also its interactions with its surrounding system components. Additionally, the Full-System Simulator is capable of booting K42, IBM's research operating system, and rHype, the research hypervisor.

SOURCE: Slashdot | Christian Churches Celebrate Darwin's Birthday

It is really sad how people today put "Christian" labels on everything to "justify" their cause. It seems that if you want an ok from the Christian community, all you have to do is publish how many Christian churches >or people is part of your group, and in some way this will that justify the cause. How does this logic work?

Then there's also the question of 450 churches... That's like 0.001% (not scientific - mocking only) of all Christian churches on Earth :)

But in order to bring a little perspective into this, let me start from the beginning. I have written an earlier piece on a certain Vatican Paper. There are a number of Biblical references there, which basically shows how stupid (from a Christian perspective) the idea of evolution actually is. The Christian faith is based on the belief that God created the heavens and the earth.

So what are we as Christians then supposed to do?

Well:

* Pray that the God will reveal the truth through the Holy Spirit in every Christian's life.
* Pray that God should be tolerant and forgive people this sin
* Ask God for wisdom, so that we as Christian can speak the truth about this matter to all people
* Ask the Holy Spirit to prepare the hearts of people we will talk to about this subject so that they are able to understand this truth

Only through the Holy Spirit preparing the hearts of all people can we reveal the truth to all people. Out of our own, that is not possible - after all, it is God who created us, and therefore it is He who can speak into our hearts...