ECE571 Project
During the second half of the semester there will be a project.
You will conduct power/energy/performance research that's
applicable to embedded systems.
The Assignment
- Choose a topic by March 26th (a list of suggestions is below.
e-mail me when you have chosen a topic)
- You can work with a partner. Groups of two will be expected to
do more work than someone working alone.
- There will be two required status updates
- April 5th, as part of HW#4 --
Description of existing related work.
- April 19th, as part of HW#5 --
Description of the experiments you intend to conduct, including
hardware needed and benchmarks used.
- Write a short paper (at least 6 pages) Due May 3rd (extended to May 8th)
It will have the format of a short conference/journal/workshop paper
and should have the following sections:
- Introduction
- Related Work (an extended version of what you had in HW#4)
- Experimental Setup (an extended version of what you had in HW#5)
- Results / Analysis
- Conclusion / Future Work
- Give a 20 minute presentation the last week of
classes describing your project and findings.
Project Ideas
- Power/Energy overhead from prefetching (can turn off prefetching
on some systems, like core2 and cortex a9)
- Power/Energy overhead from branch prediction (can turn off prefetching
on MIPS chips, not sure about ARM)
- Power/Energy overhead from caches (find a system you can disable
the cache? The ARM systems)
- Power/Energy vs performance on various ARM processors
- Estimating power/energy using performance counters
- Power/Energy implications from frequency scaling
- Power/Energy on various operating systems (Linux,OSX,Windows,FreeBSD,etc)
- Validating
RAPL energy measurements
on real hardware.
- Make DVFS frequency scaling decisions based on hardware counter
results
- More to come, open to suggestions
Equipment
I have various machines that might be of help when working on the project.
- ARM Cortex A9 Pandaboard with performance counters
- ARM Cortex A8 Beagleboard with power measurement and performance counters
- ARM Cortex A15 Chromebook with performance counters
- ARM 1176 Raspberry Pi (perf counters not working yet)
- Watts Up Pro logging power meter
- Ivy Bridge laptop with RAPL power counters
- Measuring power/energy with simulators
- Various other machines (Pentium II, Pentium 4, SPARC, AVR)
- Feel free to use any other machines you have access to
Back to the maine ECE571 Page