Farewell to Intel

I’ve spent the last ten year working at Intel. For the first four and a half years, I was working at Krylatsky Hills office in Moscow, Russia. The rest of the time at Intel I spent at Drottningholms office in Stockholm, Sweden. It was a long and interesting journey from intern to senior software engineer, from bachelor student at MIPT to PhD.

I started at Intel in June 2012 as an intern working on a research project focused on supercomputer technologies for biomedicine and pharmacology. My main task at that moment was to analyze how different network topologies influence the overall performance of experiments running in the cluster. Intel Simics simulator was used to model different configurations of a (usually bigger) cluster while running on a smaller real cluster.

After that, I worked on different processor models in Simics. I was mostly focused on x86 architecture during all the years at Intel, but Itanium was actually the first processor model I worked on. It happened couple of months before Itanium project was officially discontinued by Intel.

Back to x86, a lot of exciting things happened during all these years. Starting with model development for x86 instructions set extensions, like CET; continuing to long and challenging debugs, cross-platform development (including macOS port of Simics VT-x based kernel-mode accelerator) and ending up with lots of performance optimization activities. Many of the performance activities (like page scanning to get around incompatibilities between different generations) became part of my PhD. I want to say additional thank you to all my Intel colleagues who helped me with my PhD journey. The PhD defense was celebrated by a great mountain trip leading to Simics flag delivered to the top of Europe’s highest mountain Elbrus:

I worked with great people and learned a lot of new things over the ten years at Intel, but I’ve decided that it is time to move on. So, today I farewell with my colleagues and leave Intel.