Architecture Research Project (Project 2)
CS 641, Dr. Lawlor
30% of your overall course grade comes from the three semester
projects. Project 1 was research-oriented. Project 2
will be on SIMD: SWAR, SSE, VFP, or GPU programming.
March 2011
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
1 2 3 4 5 <- project 2 topic
6 7 8 9 10 11 12 <- midterm exam
13 14 15 16 17 18 19 <- spring break (no class)
20 21 22 23 24 25 26 <- rough draft due
27 28 29 30 31 <- final code due; in-class presentations
Please have your project 2 topic (see suggestions below) picked out by class on Thursday, March 3. You don't need to write anything up, but you should
be ready to give a useful four-sentence synopsis of the topic, so
some
background reading is recommended!
After spring break, the rough draft code will be due on Thursday, March 24. This doesn't have to be tuned or high performance, but it does have to basically do what you're after.
Thursday, March 31,
we'll do in-class presentations of your overall approach, code, and
performance tuning process. Your final code and a
performance analysis are due at midnight that night.
Suggested Project 2 Topics
Or choose your own topic! Topics should all be programming
of the form "Build an X" rather than mere research of the "Learn and
present what people have done about X" variety. Of course, the
best way to build a good thing is to learn what other people have done,
so some research is useful too.
Here are some project suggestions. As long as it's SIMD-based, it counts.
- SIMD Within A Register:
- x86 SSE or ARM VFP:
- Write and tune a real implementation of any
interesting algorithm: long vector adds, dot product, matrix-vector
multiply, fractal rendering, etc.
- GPU:
- Write anything interesting on the GPU, using any of the GPU interfaces: GLSL, CUDA, OpenCL.