Assembly Language: Class Project 2

CS 301 Lecture, Dr. Lawlor

From the syllabus:

PROJ: A sizable class project--one big program written in or relating to assembly.

Each project is 10% of your course grade, so it should have some pretty good stuff! Conversely, the total end-to-end time for the project is under 1 month, so keep it manageable. Here's the schedule:

   November 2009    
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
22 23 24 25 26 27 28 <- Describe your topic in-class (& thanksgiving break)
29 30   

   December 2009    
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       1  2  3  4  5 <- Rough draft code due
 6  7  8  9 10 11 12 
13 14 15 16 17 18 19 <- Final draft code due (& final exam)

The project topic (see ideas below) should be easy to describe in two sentences. You'll say those sentences in class, partly so that I hear them, and partly so that other people in class that are interested in the same thing have a chance to join your group. Group work is optional, but not required for this project.

The rough draft code should work, but not necessarily do everything you want, or be polished or very high performance.

The final code should be fully debugged, tuned, commented, and include a short README explaining what it is, how fast it runs, and what you did to make it faster.

Project Topic Ideas

Or, pick your own! This half of the semester has mostly focused on performance: SSE, tuning and benchmarking, and GPU code. Thus, you'll need to measure and document the performance of your code somehow. Your code can run totally inside NetRun, or be a standalone executable, but it should run somewhere.

Extend your project 1 project: make it faster, more interesting, more parameterizable, or run on a different machine.
Write or modify a program to do something high-performance in assembly language.
Do something interesting with SSE. Almost any code where different floats take a different number of iterations is very interesting under SSE.
Do something interesting on the graphics card: render a new image, or even use my gpgpu library to do something non-image related.
Tune and benchmark any existing program. No assembly code is needed!