Blog
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning
Image © 2007 Alfio Brignoni, CC BY-SA 2.0. Hello, I’m Sam, an A-Level student who currently works part-time at Embecosm as a System Administrator. This week I have been at Embecosm doing work experience, and was tasked with creating a disaster recovery and business continuity plan, to ensure that business can be resumed if an […]
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Flexible Runtime Testing of LLVM on Embedded Systems
The LLVM Integrated Tester (aka lit) and LLVM Nightly Test infrastructure (aka lnt) systems are the primary means of testing LLVM tools. Lit is the driver system for the regression tests within LLVM and tests the non-target specific behavior of the compiler. The nightly tests, lnt, comprise complete programs can are used to test the […]
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AAP: A reference Harvard architecture for embedded compiler development
An Altruistic Processor (AAP) is an architecture specification designed for experimenting with compiler back end implementation. In particular it has features that are common within small deeply embedded systems. It is also designed to be easy to use in demonstrations and for education/training, with hardware and simulator implementations as well as the tool chain and […]
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Utilizing TableGen for Non-Compiling Processes
When porting any compiler, one of the large pieces of code is the machine description, defining instructions, registers, calling conventions, etc. In LLVM, this is done via TableGen, a simple record based DSL that allows all information about an architecture to be built rapidly and concisely. However, its generality and simple design appears to naturally allow expansion […]
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British Innovation at Embedded World
A couple of weeks ago I was asked by TechUK to speak about British innovation at the Embedded World exhibition and conference in Nuremberg. The UK is the fourth largest exhibitor — after the hosts Germany, the US and Taiwan — and this was an opportunity, along with colleagues from Intel and Imagination Technologies, to look […]
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FOSDEM 2015
This year Embecosm attended FOSDEM again, in full force. I gave a main track talk onon Superoptimization in the Performance strand, following on from the TSB funded Superoptimization feasibility study. Superoptimization is a technique to search for the best possible program, achieving the fastest, most energy-efficient or smallest code. I covered how superoptimization works and […]
Read moreSo Make It Relaunch
As part of Embecosm’s community outreach we recently put on a soldering workshop at So Make It, the local Southampton Makerspace. This was to be part of their grand reopening after their recent move to a larger building. In our workshop we gave attendants the opportunity to build their own computer in the form of […]
Read moreThe next generation of engineers: another way to encourage them
As I have written before, we face a challenge maintaining British excellence in computer engineering. It is an industry where we excel, but last summer the BBC reported that we face a “retirement cliff”, with the average age of an engineer in Britain now being 54 years. It is not for a lack of jobs. […]
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Embecosm’s James Pallister wins NMI Young Engineer of the Year
Our very own James Pallister was last night announced as the winner of the NMI Young Engineer of the Year award. James is a Research Engineer and Technical Advisor to Embecosm, and also a PhD research student at Bristol University, where he studies energy efficient computing systems, and is supervised by Dr Kerstin Eder. MAGEEC […]
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