Architecture Research Project (Project 1)

CS 441, Dr. Lawlor
A substantial chunk of your course grade comes from the two semester projects. Project 1, a group project, will be 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 20:

   September 2010   
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30       <- topic due

    October 2010    
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
                1  2
 3  4  5  6  7  8  9 <- writeup due
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 <- presentations
17 18 19 20 21 22 23 <- midterm exam
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Please have your project 1 topic (see list below) picked out by class on Tuesday, September 28. You don't need to write anything up, but you should be ready to give a useful two-minute synopsis of the topic, enough to get one of your fellow students excited enough to join your group, 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 at midnight Thursday, October 7.

We'll do the presentations on Tuesday October 12. There are seven people in class, and 90 minutes, so that's about 12 minutes per person. You should prepare about 10 minutes of interesting, informative content, which leaves 2 minutes for questions and 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.

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". Of course, if you really *want* to write code/solder something, I'm not going to stop you!

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
Register renaming
Branch prediction, branch history, 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 hardware 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.
Describe the historical evolution of some computer architecture, such as SPARC or Motorola's 68000.
Explore the decline and fall of some popular computer architecture, such as the VAX ("All the world's a VAX!" Or, er, it was...)

Keep in mind that Project 1 will be a *group* project, so you'll have to divide up the work between people.