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Inside NVIDIA's Massive Hardware Emulation Lab
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA recently decided to give the public a look at their massive investment in hardware emulation technologies. Hardware emulators are specialized systems that can be programmed to emulate any specific architecture. In NVIDIA's case, a standard x86 system is connected to a powerful hardware emulator that's been pre-programmed to emulate a GeForce GPU that's still under design. The testbed generates the code in question and sends it over to the emulator, which then executes and returns the output. The emulators are massive machines that can be connected together and scaled for capacity and performance. NVIDIA's Indus emulator can emulate up to two billion gates and in their entire facility, the company can emulate up to 4 billion total."
Why not link directly to the blog post instead of a rewording of it?
http://blogs.nvidia.com/2011/05/sneak-peak-inside-nvidia-emulation-lab/
Wow, NVIDIA paid Cadence millions for a more or less off the shelf logic accelerator. Just like every other company that's designing a large ASIC.
Not too sure I understand all that from reading the summary but it sure does sound cool. When I think emulator, I think of NESticle, wonder how many gates it has...
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
Mod parent up
I mean that is what they use when the GPU hangs, so its piece of cake for them to see where the bug is,
but we are stuck with final version and just can't debug it.
imagine a beowulf cluster[1] of these, could they run Crysis ?
[1]"Does it run Linux?" is implied here...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Uh, this kind of debugging has been in use since the late 1980's. The only things that have changed are the vendors who build the emulators and the size of the hardware that can be emulated. Why is this amazing?
That is all.
this raises a question: are we inside one of their emulations right now? Just emulating away, so that some company can put together yet another universe-detailed-resolution-video-card on the hyper market?
This would explain all those weird things I dream about at night, where everything seems to consist of only polygons with no rendered surfaces.
You can't handle the truth.
So it's an "emulator" you say? It "simulates" a "hardware device".
Would not another word for this be: "Virtual Machine"? Have they cleared this with Oracle, or did NVIDIA just get caught with their pants down? (stroking their e-peen)
How are you getting around VMWare's patent on saving and restoring a VM state? Clearly you'll want to do that to enable debugging of your soft-hardware. (Even though many VMs could do that long before the patent was applied for -- My old Lisp machine emulator did).
Inquiring minds want to know... specifically, what do I have to do so that the new VM based languages (like Java/Davlik or Lua?!) don't infringe any VM software patents? (Or are you taking the same advice my lawyer gave me? "Ignore the patents, foreknowledge makes infringement penalties greater. If you can stay under the radar by using different terminology long enough to become successful, we can negotiate a (cross) licensing deal.")
Software Patents Bad. Even For Hardware Company.
Every chip design house does emulation as part of the pre-silicon verification effort. As the chip design complexity goes up the emulation effort should scale up proportionally, but there is nothing fundamentally new here.
"NVIDIA's Indus emulator can emulate up to two billion gates"
How many Ballmers can it emulate?
Visual Basic?
Use your genius 3dfx engineers to make a fully functional faithful virtual Voodoo2 device done in CUDA.
Things like NESticle are software emulators. The idea is to reverse-engineer an existing piece of hardware so that you can figure out how to make software which does the same thing, but not necessarily in the same way -- you want to be able to run software that runs on the NES, say, but you don't care at all whether the program in your computer contains an exact replica of every chip on the NES. Even if you wanted the identical behavior, you still wouldn't need to give it an exact replica.
This is a hardware emulator in both senses -- it is itself a big pile of hardware, and it's emulating hardware, exhaustively, in every detail. The idea here is that you want to have as much assurance as is reasonably possible that when you actually fab that chip, it's going to do what you think it will. You're not just testing that your software which will run on that card will do what it's supposed to do -- that'd be considerably easier, we have things like CUDA and software implementations of OpenGL if that was the only issue. No, you want to be sure that the hardware itself, as you designed it, will work when you actually build it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
> NVIDIA's Indus emulator can emulate up to two billion gates and in their entire facility, the company can emulate up to 4 billion total.
I suppose the cost to simulate jobs was way to expensive for the ~10% of the 4billion total.
Here is a link to the Hardware as well. http://www.cadence.com/products/sd/palladium_xp/Pages/default.aspx
Too bad that it only runs at 4Mhz. I was dreaming of a configureable super computer. And yes I understand that for it to even work at 4Mhz is pretty freaking cool. Where is the buy now button?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Its looks like they are giving the ATI the best competition now with their new GPU's let see when they are in market.
but open source is better. at least open up the old drivers (such as on my hp touchsmart pc, which doesn't touch and isn't smart) to allow ubuntu to support driver. then i could have a throbbing icon.