Fault tolerant architectures are emerging to guarantee the reliable functionality of vulnerable silicon devices. However, the growing complexity of the coherence protocol and Network-on-Chip (NoC) design come to be a big challenge to presilicon verification. In this work, we implemented a custom designed robust MESI and directory based cache coherence protocol in System Verilog and practiced wi...

Inferno is an operating system well suited to applications that need to be portable, graphical, and networked. This paper describes the fundamental oating point facilities of the system, including: tight rules on expression evaluation, binary/decimal conversion, exceptions and rounding, and the elementary function library. Although the focus of Inferno is interactive media, its portability acro...

Virtual machines are an important component of modern portable environments such as Inferno and Java because they provide an architecture-independent representation of executable code. Their performance is critical to the success of such environments, but they are difficult to design well because they are subject to conflicting goals. On the one hand, they offer a way to hide the differences be...

Over the last half century the Iberian peninsula has seen the large scale planting of exotic gum trees (Eucalyptus sp.) therewith reducing space for native wildlife. An additional effect of the gum tree plantations may be the lowering of the water table in adjacent streams, to which amphibian species with a larval niche in the running sections of small streams would be especially susceptible. I...

In the spring of 2004, a semester-long course for undergraduates was organized as part of CMU’s student-taught StuCo (student college) curriculum. The course covered material ranging from a historical background on Inferno’s development, the Limbo programming language and related systems such as Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), to the implementations of the Inferno emulator and native ...

Galileo’s realization that nature is not scale invariant, motivating his subsequent discovery of scaling laws, is traced to two lectures he gave on the geography of Dante’s Inferno.

We are sincerely grateful to have been invited by the Guest Editor of this special issue, Prof. Francesca Lisi, to write an article in honor of our mentor Gaetano Aurelio Lanzarone (for students, colleagues and friends simply ‘Elio’). We were the first (Stefania) and last (Federico) of Elio’s students, and we both entertained a particularly deep relation with him. What we want to do here is to ...

Earliest arrival flows are motivated by applications related to evacuation. In typical evacuation situations, the most important task is to get people out of an endangered building or area as fast as possible. Since it is usually not known how long a building can withstand a fire before it collapses or how long a dam can resist a flood before it breaks, it is advisable to organize an evacuation...