Architectural Longview Term Paper

You will write a term paper of no more than 10 single-column, 1.5-spaced, 10pt font pages that analyzes at least three of the papers in the Parallel Computer Architectures section of the Reading List. For this assignment, you will identify and analyze a specific architectural design space dimension, as it is addressed by the course readings. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate your understanding of a topic covered by the course, to synthesize knowledge about your chosen design dimension by drawing from multiple sources, and to articulate the critical questions that have been asked, answered, and left unanswered (if there are any). It may be helpful to identify papers that take very different or even opposing positions on an issue and to describe the essence of their conflict. Likewise, it may be helpful to identify a collection of papers that have the same goal, but very different approaches to that goal. You will be expected in this paper to show that you are fluent in the terminology and concepts up to this point, including performance limits, parallel execution strategies, coherence, consistency, synchronization, transactional execution, determinism, concurrency errors, and Dark Silicon. Your paper must address some aspect of multicore scalability; you may relate the topic you selected to a parameter of multicore scalability, or you may provide a well-supported argument that the topic you selected is invariant to the Dark Silicon problem.

Your paper should not be only a summary of the papers you are discussing, although you should provide as much summary explanation of the papers as necessary to make your point. Include figures in your paper as necessary to support your arguments. You should work alone on this assignment. You are expected to cite all ideas that come from existing work. You are expected to support your arguments with evidence. An ideal submission for this assignment would reveal a connection between ideas that is not obvious, and make an argument for the importance of that connection based on facts from supporting literature. You should start on this assignment only after the class on Dark Silicon (3/8/2018). This assignment is due approximately three weeks from the distribution date, Monday 4/2/2018 11:59:59pm. Submit your paper as a pdf document via Canvas.