MC723 - Computer systems design laboratory

Notices

30/06	Notes on pgina. EXAME students should contact (by email) as soon as possible to close the activity to be delivered until the end of the semester. The presentations of the exam activities can be made until 16/07.
25/06	The first notes are already in the pgina.
22/06	The instructions for delivering the final version have been updated. Read carefully. Remember that everyone must deliver the work by June 23, regardless of the day of the presentation. For this delivery, as always, the 06-hour grace period is also worthwhile.
11/06	The course evaluation forms are next to my classroom door. One envelope contains blank forms and the other is for completed forms. Please make the evaluation of the discipline.
11/05	Have you already reserved the day for your group's presentation? Make your reservation on the wiki.
18/05	Take the results of the evaluation of the works in the discipline area of ​​xaveco.
30/04	See a brief tutorial on Exercise 4. For this you need to create a login on the video site and navigate to MC723AB.
28/04	Delivery of Exercise 4 postponed to 06/05.
22/04	Have you read the section of this page related to the opening hours?
08/04	Listing with all deliveries so far. This listing will be updated with upcoming deliveries as well.
06/04	List of deliveries of the first exercise.
31/03	There will be no class on 14/04.
31/03	Deadline for formation of discipline groups on wiki 30/04. The choice of themes should be made with the teacher, during the classes schedule of the days 7/04 and 28/04. After April 30, students without groups will be grouped and groups without themes will have the themes allocated by the teacher.
30/03	Due to the weekend's power outage, the report for exercise 1 can be delivered until 01/04 - 8am.
02/03	Important dates of graduation calendar.

Objectives

Improve the concepts learned in the Computer Systems Design course through exercises and the modeling of a system with processor (s) and peripheral (s).

Activities

The semester will be divided into two parts: exercises and project. In the exercise section, each student will implement small activities to ensure understanding of some basic topics. In the second part, each group will implement a project that will be defined at the beginning of the semester.

All deliveries have an automatic grace period of 24 hours, but I will not accept any justification for postponement based on facts that occurred in those 24 hours. The grace period is not valid if you exceed the term limit.

• Exercises (individual, everyone should do)
• Works (in group, 1 work per group)

REFERENCES

• David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy. Computer Organization Design, The Hardware / Software Interface. Morgan Kaufmann
• Language ArchC
• Language SystemC

Project Manager

In addition to the time reserved for the subject, I can serve students at various alternative times, including bits of the lunch time and also early evening hours ( until 20h).

To facilitate your service, try to book by email to ensure that I am available on the day. Send a message suggesting an opening time (look at my updated schedule). If you want to show me some code, try to have it installed on the ssh.students.ic.unicamp.br machine so that it is easy to demonstrate on the spot (please avoid bringing something to install on my machine, my experience says that we will have great work to install).

Exercises

Everyone must do each of the following exercises individually:

• Exercise 1: Creation and evaluation of a collective benchmark.
• Exercise 2: Compiling, running, debugging and more ...
• Exercise 3: Simulation of caches
• Exercise 4: Multicore platforms

Jobs

Deadlines:

• 12/05: Delivery of the Detailed Specification
• 26/05: Delivery of the First Phase
• 09/06: Second Stage Delivery
• 23/06: Final Delivery

Each delivery must be in the form of a report with a maximum size of 2 pages. All groups must keep the code defined for each delivery for presentation. There will be a draw for the two intermediate phases and all groups will make a final presentation on 23/06 and 30/06.

Detailed Specification Report

This is the first report where the group must describe, in detail, what will be done at work. The limit is still 2 pages, so please write only what is necessary. Think of it as a phase of study and improvement of the specification. Use the concepts you have already learned from the exercises, along with the goals for your work. It is possible to change the specification in the future, along with other deliveries (talk to the teacher if necessary).

For platform work, I recommend the following sections:

1. Introduction: Briefly present what is expected of your platform: functionalities, features, components, motivation to create it, a general diagram of the platform can be useful for future sections, etc
2. Platform components: Create a subsection for each of the components and indicate relevant questions about each one. Ex .: communication protocol, interface with the software, restrictions, form of implementation (at least one goal), etc.
3. Software: What will be done in software, how will it work, what will run on each processor, etc.
4. Distribution of activities for each delivery: Planning the next 3 deliveries and justification for the chosen approach. Ex .: each delivery can have a subset of the components implemented and working or all components will be developed in parallel but will be partially delivered in each delivery, etc.
5. Allocation of activities to the group members: If the group is going to divide the activities, indicate which ones will remain with each member.

For other works, the format is free, but use the above description about platforms as inspiration.

Delivery format

For partial deliveries, proceed according to the exercises delivering only a 2-page report named gXXfY.pdf where XX Your group number with 2 digits and Y the delivery number. The subject of the email should be: MC723 - FY - GXX.

A file with the name gXX.tgz, Where XX Is the number of your group with 2 digits (Ex .: 01 instead of 1), sent by email containing the subject: MC723 - FY - GXX, Where Y the delivery phase and XX Is your group number. Within this file there must be only one directory with the name gXXWhere XX Is the number of your group, and within that directory it must contain:

• A delivery report with the name gXXfY.pdfWhere XX the name of your group and Y phase number
• The other files required for delivery as below:
• If your project is on a platform, only the file generated by the command arp.py --pack, after the execution of a make clean not to send garbage. Your project will be tested by unzipping the package sent, executing make e make run. It is the group's obligation to ensure that the desired functionality is available by executing only these three commands
  
• If your project is on a processor, the source files for ArchC
• In other cases, the necessary source files, as well as compilation scripts and documentation.

Some groups are complaining about not being able to execute the command arp. The problem is in the command you are trying to execute. The correct command is arp.py that is inside the directory bin. Unfortunately there is another program within the arp package that is causing this confusion (it was a soft-link that ended up being broken during distribution).

Any delivery out of specification that does not have a prior agreement with the teacher will be strictly disregarded.

Calendar

03 / 03T	Presentation of the discipline
10 / 03T
17 / 03T
24 / 03T
31 / 03T
07 / 04T
14 / 04T	There will be no class.
21 / 04T	Holiday. There will be no class.
28 / 04T
05 / 05T
12 / 05T	There will be no class.
19 / 05T
26 / 05T
02 / 06T
09 / 06T
16 / 06T
23 / 06T	Presentation and Delivery. Reservations on the wiki.
30 / 06T	Presentation and Delivery. Reservations on the wiki.