Architecture Research Project (Project 2)

   November 2010
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
    1  2  3  4  5  6
 7  8  9 10 11 12 13 <- project topics in class
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 <- rough draft code due (then Thanksgiving break)
28 29 30

   December 2010
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
          1  2  3  4 
 5  6  7  8  9 10 11 <- presentations
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 <- finals week, final code and performance analysis due 
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31

• In class on November 12, be ready to very briefly (a few sentences) describe your project topic.
• Turn in your rough draft code, which should run and do something related to your problem, by November 23.  This code need not be well commented or heavily optimized.
  
• Present your code in class on December 7.  Plan for about ten minutes of presentation: describe your problem, show us your code, and walk us through your optimization process.
  
• Turn in your final polished code and performance analysis on December 16.  This code should be commented, pretty, and high performance.
  

Possible Project 2 Topics

• Hardware performance analysis: benchmark some test programs that demonstrates some aspect of modern hardware, such as:
  
• Out-of-order execution (e.g., reorder instructions manually, compare to automatic reordering)
  
• Branch prediction and execution speculation (e.g., reverse-engineer x86 branch hardware, like compare always-taken branch performance with even-odd branch performance)
• Dependency tracking (e.g., benchmark performance benefit from decreasing dependency tree depth)
  
• Cache prefetching and out-of-order loads and stores (e.g., compare cached loads with cached loads matching a previous store)
• Software development: write and benchmark something on any new parallel high-performance architecture, such as:
• SSE/SIMD
  
• OpenMP/Multicore
• MPI cluster
  
• GPU
• Or build a new language that magically expands to cover any of these!