CPSC 614 Computer Architecture Term Project

Each student is required to work on a term project for 25% of course grade. Groups of two are recommended. Note that no more than two in a team are allowed.

Report Type	Due Date
Project Proposal It should present your initial thoughts and outline of the project. It should also include the proposed outcome of the work, outline the approach, and relevant references.	3/24
Final Report Typewritten in 10~20 double spaced pages (single column), it should describe your work in detail and have the format of a technical paper. In particular, it should include an abstract, introduction, description of your problem (including previous work), description of the proposed improvement, performance analysis, conclusions, and a list of references. Include all your work, all diagrams, simulation code, sample runs of your experiments/simulations, division of work (if more than one student participated) and other relevant information as appendices. Include the term project evaluation form as the first page of the project report.

Project Ideas

You are expected to do literature survey and come up with a suitable problem for the term project. The project should propose some sort of design improvement to CPU, ISA, compiler techniques, interconnection networks, or memory hierarchy and evaluate the same using a simulator or experiments on existing systems. Here is a list of pointers to probe for ideas.

• Recent proceedings

- International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA)*

- International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS)

- Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS)

- International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)*

- International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom)

- International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)*

- Annual ACM IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)

- International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED)

• List of papers on simplescalar web site: http://www.simplescalar.com/friends.html
• List of projects mentioned in the PROJECTS file distributed with simplescalar tools
• Evaluating cache memory hierarchy using microbenchmarks. Problem 5.2 is a starting point. Also see

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~cthombor/Perf/Cache/cachp.ps.gz

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/saavedra95measuring.html for more information.

Links:

ACM Digital library

CiteSeer

IEEE Xplore

ACM Computing Surveys  (Survey topics and "seed" papers )