Project 1: Research Project Topic

CS 441 Project, Dr. Lawlor

A substantial chunk of your course grade comes from the two semester projects. Project 1 is more research-oriented. Project 2 will be more applied and implementation-oriented. From the syllabus:
PROJ1: a paper and in-class presentation on an architecture topic of your choice, due in October.

Here's what's left of the semester, before the midterm on October 21:

   September 2008   
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 <- Topic due
28 29 30            

    October 2008    
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
          1  2  3  4
 5  6  7  8  9 10 11 <- Writeup due
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 <- Presentations
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 <- Midterm!

Please have your project 1 topic (see list below) picked out by class on Thursday, September 25. You don't need to write anything up, but you should be ready to give a useful two-minute synopsis of the topic, so some background reading is recommended! We'll assign the time slots for the real presentations in class.

I'd like you to prepare a brief 2-3 page lecture note style writeup in HTML, with lots of hyperlinks. I'll post your writeup as the lecture notes for that day's class. The writeups are due Thursday, October 9.

We'll start with the presentations on Tuesday October 14, and continue on Thursday October 16. There are five people in class, and two 90-minute class days, so that's about 30 minutes per person. You should prepare about 20 minutes of interesting, informative content, which leaves 5 minutes for questions and 5 minutes to change speakers. PowerPoint is NOT required, but you MUST have a clear idea of what you will present AND some sort of examples/illustrations/code/graphs.

Topics presented in class will appear on the midterm, so ask questions if the presenter stops making sense!

Possible Project 1 Topics

Or choose your own topic! Topics should all be research of the form "Learn and present what people have done about X" rather than applied work of the form "Build a new X".

Learn about the rationale, history, and advantages/disadvantages of any current hardware topic, such as:

Pipelining, especially the very deep piplines of the Pentium 4
Out-of-order execution
Branch prediction and execution speculation
Cache prefetching and out-of-order loads and stores
Multi-core, SMP, SMT, or SIMD parallelism (pick one!)

Describe how the design limitations and goals of nonstandard computing platforms differ from conventional computing, such as:

High-performance computing systems, such as Blue Gene or anything on the Top500 list.

Consumer game consoles, such as the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, or Wii.
Embedded systems, such as cell phones or microwave ovens.

Pick a hardware-related article from Ars Technica. Explain what they're talking about in detail.
Pick a CPU architecture from sandpile.org. Compare this architecture's software design, in terms of achievable performance, with competing architectures.
Describe performance Counters, which are useful for understanding code performance and pipelining (see PCL)
Describe a strange fabrication substrate or nonstandard computing scheme, such as Biological Computing, Quantum Computing, self-organizing polymer nanofabrication, etc.
Describe novel data storage architectures, such as perpendicular bit recording, magnetoresistive memory, nanowire memory.
Describe a semiconductor or PCB fabrication process in detail, such as the problems encountered during deep-submicron photolithography, or the interelationship between planarization and metal layers in CMOS fabrication.