IBM News on Ulitzer

Virtutech®, Inc., the leader in virtualized systems development (VSD), today announced that Wind River has successfully deployed the Simics® simulation platform for development of both its Wind River Hypervisor and secure VxWorks MILS Platform. With Virtutech Simics as the foundation for its complex and challenging development projects, Wind River adopted more iterative, flexible processes that meet the demands of developing advanced run-times for multicore and multi-OS applications.

“With both Wind River Hypervisor and the VxWorks MILS Platform, Simics enabled Wind River to leverage capabilities like system checkpointing and reverse execution, while providing complete visibility inside a complex software image,” said Michel Genard, vice president of marketing, Virtutech, Inc. “While Wind River is well known as a developer of innovative software solutions and developer tools, including Wind River Workbench, it should also be recognized for adopting agile development processes that will change the way companies conduct their businesses.”

Wind River initially licensed Virtutech Simics three years ago as the simulation platform for the Freescale 8641D. A year later, the company turned to Simics as the development platform for its two most intricate projects: its multicore-capable hypervisor software and the development of its MILS architecture secure platform. Simics provided a standard PowerPC/Intel platform as the foundation layer so Wind River developers could go directly to developing code for their hypervisor technology, significantly cutting the time it took to develop the firmware, hardware and tools required for running a wide variety of embedded operating systems.

“Whether you are building the core hardware, OS or surrounding architecture, multicore technology is so disruptive that companies really must do things differently,” said Marcus Levy, president of the Multicore Association. “Wind River hypervisor technology is another example of a company deploying Virtualized Systems Development as the ‘must have’ development foundation for sophisticated multicore environments.”

For its new secure VxWorks MILS Platform, Simics helped Wind River to quickly develop “what-if” use cases, build the complex test cases needed for any secure application development and port from one architecture in a matter of days instead of months.

“The Simics technology is an essential technology component to develop our advanced run-times such as Wind River Hypervisor and VxWorks MILS,” said Emeka Nwafor, director of product management, Wind River. “Our experience has been that applying VSD has improved the effectiveness of our development and testing activities and streamlined the development of these intricate run-times. This has been beneficial in managing the same schedule and cost pressures that our customers face.”

About Simics

Simics is a high performance full-system simulator that enables engineers to develop, debug, test and run their entire software application stack on a virtual representation of their target hardware named virtual platform. The overall engineering development efforts are reduced through advanced capabilities normally not available with physical hardware: non-invasive debugging and tracing, saving and later resuming execution, full deterministic behavior, built-in networking capabilities, forward and reverse execution, ability to examine, control, and break on any internal device and to inject faults, and the ability to save system state and later replay it. Simics runs unmodified production-quality binaries and can be used with third party software development tools.

Intel, Intel Architecture, Intel Core, Intel Core2 Duo and Intel Atom are trademarks of Intel in the US and other countries.

About Virtutech

Virtutech, Inc. is the leader in product development process improvement through virtualized systems development (VSD). Virtutech Simics® allows for a revolutionary change in the product development process at a full system level rather than a component level and is the only commercial solution that delivers the four most important criteria for successful deployment of hardware virtualization in the electronics equipment development process: speed, scalability, model availability, and control. Simics customers report reduced time to market, better project risk management, lower capital expenditure, product development cost and maintenance as well as increased quality and individual productivity. Virtutech serves the needs of the world’s leading OEMs in the high-performance computing, aerospace and defense, telecommunications, networking and semiconductor industries. Customers include Cisco, Ericsson, Freescale Semiconductor, GE Avionics, Honeywell, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Nortel, Northrop Grumman, MontaVista Software and Wind River. Virtutech is an active participant in organizations to drive adoption of VSD such as ARM Connected Community, Eclipse.org, IBM PartnerWorld, Multicore Association, Power.org, OSCI and Spirit Consortium. Virtutech is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. For more information, visit www.virtutech.com.