Simulation? Virtualization? What's in a name?

Check out this great panel round-table conversation about Virtualization & Simulation featuring a great set of panelists from Virtutech, Freescale, Cadence, GreenSocs, and our own Wind River CTO. The discussion touches on a number of important topics, including:

• the differences between virtualization and simulation
• the level of abstractions in models and their importance in predicting a system's behavior
• methodologies driving vendors solutions for virtualization and simulation
• programmable hardware and vanilla (i.e. standard) platforms

While the panelists do not agree on all points, I had a few great takeaways from the discussion:

1. Platform simulation is important to software engineers for managing complexity and risk when analyzing software performance - beyond MIPS and footprint. This is particularly the case when migrating existing software to multicore and dealing with race conditions resulting from parallelization of existing algorithms.
2. Multiple abstract models can be leveraged to ensure application integrity and timing, even before silicon is available. This involves abstract models ranging from cycle accurate instruction simulators to fast OS simulators. 
3. Software development can be fast-tracked using one or more abstract models of the hardware.

Proprietary and commercial simulation solutions have been around for many years. The need to shorten hardware-software integration time and achieve the goal of having working software when silicon/hardware arrives is a good reason to give virtual systems development solutions a good look.