The main goal of the final labs and the project is to explore an idea that interests you that involves
modifying FPGA hardware and software to increase the performance of a parallel workload.
You can do those Labs and the final project alone or in a team of two.
We recommend that you form a team: not only will you be able to tackle a more interesting project,
but you will also more than double the quality of the project by having someone else to brainstorm with.
Project scope
You will want to spend a bit of time identifying a project idea that is substantial
enough to be interesting, yet simple enough to be tackled in just one month.
The purpose of sending us a project abstract early on is to let us help you choose a good balance
between ambition and tractability.
We would expect a final project
to have a more thorough correctness and performance evaluation than we asked for in the labs.
You will want to choose not just a hardware/software idea for improving performance,
but also a parallel application to use to show that your ideas improve performance.
Please do talk to the instructor about your ideas.
The report
At the end of the semester, we would like to to receive a project report from you, with the
following outline. You should use the ACM template
to write your report.
Abstract: Describe what is that you are trying to achieve, a very brief outline
of the methodology to achieve it and the final results. No more than two paragraphs.
Introduction: State a goal you'd like to achieve (something to do with improving parallel performance!),
outline your idea for achieving that goal, say what's hard about realizing it, and summarize the main performance results.
No more than two double-column pages, including Figures.
Design and Implementation: Describe what the main challenges are in realizing
your idea. Explain how you solve those challenges. Outline how you implement your idea on the
FPGA. This is the part that you use to detail your design.
Evaluation: Explain what line of reasoning or set of tests you used to
convince yourself that your design is correct. Remind the reader of the original goals of your
idea, explain how you will evaluate how well your design achieves those goals,
describe your experimental setup, and show the results of your experiments.
Be sure to explain and interpret the results,
explaining both what they mean and why the results look the way they do.
Conclusion: What are the main points of your work.
References: Other prior work relative to your project.
Designed by Nikos Bellas(nbellas at inf dot uth dot gr)
Designed by Nikos Bellas(nbellas at inf dot uth dot gr)