• List of project ideas
• Another project idea with simulator: pdf
• Talk with the course staff if you'd like to propose your own project idea.
• Piazza can be used to form groups.
• See Module 0.5 for further details on projects.
• Project Proposal Due: Monday, September 30, 2013
• Project Guidelines
• LaTeX template

Watch the recorded recitation session on 9/13 in the ECE Learning Environment for an overview of computer architecture simulation.

• Pin dynamic binary instrumentation tool
• Multi2Sim
• SAFARI group simulators (contact course staff)

• Marsx86
• SESC
• Gem5
• Sniper
• GPGPU-sim

What: Project Milestone Presentation

When/Where: November 6. For remote students, we'll schedule live sessions in the Pittsburgh AM. For local students in ECE, your time will be during normal recitation session time (location: HH 1107). For CS students, your time will be during normal lecture time. You are welcome to attend all other presentations, including remote students.

Format: 7-min presentation (slideshow, not poster) + 3min Q&A. Please practice for this length. You will be given a warning at 7 minutes and cut off at 10.

Submission: You must send your slides to 740-official@ece.cmu.edu by 11:00am. We will be running all presentations on a staff computer to reduce delay between presenters.

What to present:

• The problem you are solving + your goal
• How is this different from past work? What is your novelty?
• Your solution ideas + strengths and weaknesses
• Your methodology to test your ideas
• Concrete mechanisms you have implemented so far
• Concrete results you have so far
• What will you do next?
• What hypotheses you have for future?
• How close were you to your target?
• Make a lot of progress and find breakthroughs

Examples:

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

ECE Presentation Schedule:

When: Friday, December 13, 2013 during final exam session 5:30-8:30pm

Where: WEH 5403 and WEH 5409

We will provide easels, poster boards and pushpins. Light food/beverages will also be provided.

Feedback form: There is a required feedback form due at the poster session, see form for details.

Printing: You'll be individually responsible for printing your poster. The default recommendation is the Fedex Kinko's in the UC. The recommended size is 30x40in. 24x30in is minimum size. Please be aware that printing takes time, so we recommend you submit it for printing at least 24hrs in advance.

example poster 1 pdf, example poster 1 ppt example poster 2 pdf, example poster 2 ppt

more example posters

Note for remote students ONLY: you will instead make a one slide PPT of your “poster” (see example above). You don't need to print. To avoid issues with poor bandwidth, difficulty hearing you, etc., please prerecord and prepare a 5min audio clip describing your project/poster. We will schedule live sessions for Q/A on your poster.

You will hand in a report in the conference submission style. Your final report should be formatted and written as if you are submitting the report to a top computer architecture conference. The report should include the following:

• A descriptive title and author names
• Abstract
• Introduction (Problem and Motivation)
• Related Work and its Shortcomings
• Description of the Techniques (designed and evaluated)
• Evaluation Methodology
• Results and Analyses
• Conclusion/Summary
• Lessons Learned, Shortcomings, and Future Work
• Acknowledgements (if any)
• References (cited throughout the paper)

The page limit is 10 double column, single-spaced pages. Make sure your document is spell-checked and grammatically sound. You are encouraged to use the LaTeX template above.

Advice: The key characteristic that distinguishes a “good” research paper from a “bad” one is the existence of “clearly explained insight.” I expect the highest quality of writing as well as clear descriptions of the ideas and techniques from the final report. Even if your research results in a “negative result” (not all research ideas pan out to be useful, in fact few of them do) writing it in a very insightful and intuitive manner can make the research very powerful and important. So, please do spend a significant amount of time and effort to ensure that your report is insightful and explains the ideas very clearly (possibly with examples and good analogies).

Examples:

See the readings throughout this course for examples. Some selected favorites:

Mutlu and Moscibroda, “Parallelism-Aware Batch Scheduling,” ISCA 2008.

Onur Mutlu, Hyesoon Kim, and Yale N. Patt, "Address-Value Delta (AVD) Prediction: Increasing the Effectiveness of Runahead Execution by Exploiting Regular Memory Allocation Patterns," MICRO 2005.

The final project distributions are available here.