6.173 2010 Final Project Assignment

Dates


Goal

The main goal of your final project is to explore an idea that interests you that involves modifying Beehive hardware and software to increase the performance of a parallel workload.

You can do this 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. You maybe want to be fairly conservative about the scale of the hardware aspect of your project. The purpose of sending us a project abstract early on is to let us help you choose a good balance between ambition and tractability.

As an example of the scale we are looking for, Lab 4 or Lab 6 could have served as the core of a good final project if we had not already assigned them as labs. 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.

Have a look at the Lecture 12 notes for project ideas. Please do talk to the course staff about your ideas.

The Report

The main deliverable for this project is a project report. We expect your report to be roughly patterned after a research paper. The report should include the following sections:

In order for us to give you timely feedback, we'd like to receive the following sequence of written submissions from you:

We'll give you oral feedback during our weekly meetings and written feedback on your first draft, which we'll post by Mon, 11/29.

Submission

Email your team list and project abstract to 6.173-staff@mit.edu.

Submit your detailed proposal as a PDF.

Submit your first draft as a PDF.

Submit your final report PDF, C, and Verilog.