Term Project Guidelines

The term project is for a team of two or three students to perform original research on a topic in the field of computer architecture. Possible topics include survey of a research area, extension of an existing work, and exploration of new ideas for a specific topic. All projects will include a project proposal, progress report, presentation, and final report. The research projects will be graded on how well you define your problem, survey previous work, design and conduct your experiments, and present your results.

Since a survey paper is “safer” than a research project, the survey paper will be expected to meet a higher standard of completeness and perform a more extensive analysis of existing literature. A survey project report should contain (1) a summary of work in an area, including extensive references, (2) a statement of opinions of others for and against various options (with references), and (3) a conclusion given your options on the strengths and weaknesses of arguments presented above. Survey projects will be graded based on the completeness of your survey, the accuracy of your summaries, the support you give for your opinions, and the quality of your presentation.

Project Proposal (Due Sept. 19) (10%)

Each team should write a one to two page proposal which includes:

A description of the topic
A statement of why the topic is interesting or important
A description of the methods to be used for evaluating the proposed ideas (for research projects)
A list of resources that you plan to use to complete the project
References to at least three relevant papers that you have obtained and read on this topic. You can pick the papers from the citation of the textbook and journals and conferences with publications in computer architecture, including Proceeding of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), IEEE Transactions on Computers, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, IEEE Computer, and IEEE Micro., International Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH), International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS), etc.

Progress Report (Due Oct. 17) (15%)

Each team should write a two page status report. This report should clearly describe the progress you are making and any difficulties that you have encountered so far. If you discover any modifications that you need to make to your original proposal, you should describe these as well.

Project Presentation (Due Dec. 5) (25%)

You will be given 20-25 minutes in class to summarize your project and your results. Your presentation should include introduction, survey of existing work, strengths and weaknesses of these work, new approach (if any), performance evaluation. Each member of the group should present in the group’s presentation.

Final Report (Due Dec. 10) (50%)

The final report should be formatted following the IEEE publication guideline. It should include an abstract, introduction, body, conclusion, and a list of reference. High-quality reports will be considered for submission to conferences or journals. The abstract should summarize the contributions of the report in 150-200 words. The total length of the report should be equivalent to 15 to 20 pages at single-spaced 12-point font.

Project Topics

You are encouraged to come up with your own topic. Ideally, the topic will be related to your interests. Following are some possible research project topics:

Exploit data-level parallelism for scientific applications on multi/many-core architectures.
Exploit loop-level parallelism for streaming applications on multi/many-core architectures.
Investigate the performance enhancement of 3-D stacked memory architectures for multi/many-core processors.
Investigate the interaction between architectures and compilers for general-purpose or DSP applications and propose methods for improving this interaction.
Investigate techniques for reducing (or predicting) power consumption in system-on-chip and network-on-chip architectures.

Following are some possible survey project topics:

Survey of existing multi-core architectures in terms of ISA design, parallelism, memory architecture, compiler design, performance evaluation, applications, etc.
Survey of existing GPUs in terms of data-level parallelism, memory architecture, I/O interfaces, compiler design, and performance evaluation, etc.
Survey of the hybrid parallelism schemes/programming models for warehouse-scale computers.
Survey of existing system architectures/service models/deployment models of cloud computing.
Compare and contrast different methods for instruction level parallelism, including static scheduling, dynamic scheduling, multiple issue, and multithreading.