Some Ideas for Term Projects

Graduate Computer Architecture, Fall 2005
Shih-Hao Hung

I believe term projects are good for you as you can take this opportunity to investigate on the topics in great details, apply what you learned in the class, and get some ideas on the type of work that a computer architect does.

Since some of you asked me about the topics that I have in mind, I will list some general topics here. Based on your interest, what you know, and what are available to you, you can turn one general topic into a term project. For most of you master students there, you should be able to do this for your Master thesis. For Ph.D. students, your thesis will have to involve more than one topics like this and your research will have to be much deeper than a term project.

• Implementing tools to assist architecture design
  • Processor simulators
  • System emulators
  • Event-driven simulation
  • Trace collection via instrumentation
  • Trace-driven simulation
• Performance studies via simulation of processor architectures
  • Cache designs
  • Branch prediction strategies
  • Pipeline designs
  • Memory system designs
  • Distributed caches
  • Cache coherence protocols
  • Other system components or architectural ideas.
• Performance characterization of specific computer system
  • Benchmarking methodology
  • Workload generation
  • Comparative studies
• Performance studies via observing application execution
  • Use of performance tools
  • Exposing machine-application interactions
  • Performance analysis
  • Example applications: Webserver, Multimedia player, Large scientific applications.
• Software optimization
  • Code rescheduling
  • Data prefetch to reduce cache latency
  • Performance enhancement for applications
  • Scalability on multiprocessor systems
  • Architecture-specific optimization for crypto operations