Imagine assignment.
Dear processor architects (yeah, right),
We assume you’ve gotten familiar with the Imagine
tools by
now, so it’s time to do something that actually seems relevant.
The good news is that we decided to enable you to
distinguish (for good or bad) yourselves from your colleague students,
thereby
making our own lives more difficult: Make
your
own damn assignment!!
This isn’t a joke: Look for an application that
you like and
implement it on Imagine. You can work in pairs, but you will be
examined
individually. Find one or more processor dimensionings that offer a
good
tradeoff between cost and performance. Make the important engineering
decisions
explicit in your report and motivate them. In the Imagine machine
description
files area numbers are given. Use these numbers, along with the
performance
numbers from the simulator, to evaluate your design. Submit your report
March
19 at the latest. Consider your self a designer. Consider me a client.
Examples of questions we may ask:
- What makes you think your selected
application has any relevance now or in the future?
- Is the Imagine (in foresight or
hindsight) processor architecture a suitable implementation target for
your application?
- If yes: why
- If no (guess what): why not? What
type of processor is better suited?
- What did you have to rewrite in your
application to get it through the compiler?
- What did you have to rewrite in your
application to get it more efficiently implemented?
- How did you distribute the algorithm
over the KernelC and StreamC
- What kind, and how much communication
is required between:
- The clusters
- The stream register file and the
clusters
- The stream register file and the
memory
- Are these communication requirements
fundamental, or can you reduce it?
- At what performance should your
application run in a relevant situation?
- Can you meet that performance?
- What happens when you increase the
number of clusters or ALUs per cluster?
Assignment Steps:
- Select and implement suitable unique application (algorithm) on
Imagine architecture.
- Download tools from: http://www.ics.ele.tue.nl/~hfatemi/5JJ70/.
- For using tools, you need to install visual-C on your computer.
- First read the beginner_guide.pdf
to get familiar with tools.
- Remarks:
- All executable files are ready (it is not necessary to
recompile tools)
- Instead of adding “iscd_preproc = C:\Program Files\Microsoft
Visual Studio\VC98\Bin\CL.EXE” to your environment variables use
these ones:
- Add “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\VC98\Bin” to
your path.
- Add “iscd_preproc = CL.EXE” to your environment variables.
- For more questions: contact Hamed Fatemi PT 9.19