Group items tagged

This is an article from Design, Automation, and Test in Europe in Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe. The author of the article suggests the creation of a new type of profession that might result from the rapid advancement of hardware and software. Instead of having two separate entities that develop computer systems, the hardware and software professions, there will be one profession that handles the development of both. However, both existing professions would need to join together to make this possible. The hardware technology produced from this joining would be similar to field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), an architecture that can be "reprogrammed" on the fly. This profession would be more like the software development profession as the hardware can be reprogrammed for a particular task. I find this interesting as it could technically eliminate the lack of communication between hardware and software engineers as one would be handling both.

This is an article from the Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education in the Proceedings of the 40th ACM technical symposium on Computer science education. The article lays out a "ground up" approach to learning a complete picture of computer architecture. Instead of learning a complex and convoluted set of rules that dictates how the hardware works symbiotically with software, the authors modularize the process by creating a hands on approach to computer architecture. By starting out at the hardware level and then building to the level of abstraction created by modern operating systems and programming languages, a complete picture of how the computer functions can be obtained. I find this article interesting as it reverses the typical approach of understanding computer architecture. Instead of looking down at the hardware from the software above, the engineer or scientist can understand the ties that are created between machine level language and the hardware.

This is an article from International Conference on Supercomputing in the Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on Supercomputing. The article provides an in depth analysis of a particular technique in monitoring performance in real-time of hardware performance counters that then further analysis of bottlenecks in the microarchitecture and the software that meets hardware at a high-level abstraction layer. This real-time analysis can improve the optimization of existing software systems and lead to more efficient platforms, even applications in parallel computing. I found this article interesting as it is a technique that can improve the level of hardware literacy not only within the hardware engineering community, but it is also a technique that can be used by software developers to study the performance of their code in real life circumstances.

This is an article from Workshop On Computer Architecture Education in the Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Computer architecture education. The authors are concerned about the computer science curriculum at Georgia Tech and how so many different subtopics of computing have made their way into a computer science degree. So by reconsidering what should be considered the core of computer science, they define what is necessary for a computer science student to know at the hardware level. I find this article interesting because its cause does not only apply to George Tech, but to all computer science curricula nationwide. The main academic concern of the article is the separation of operating system courses and courses in computer architecture. The operating system is so close to the architecture that the two should be wrapped into one. This would streamline the hardware and software level of interaction and reduce confusion caused by the separation of these areas of study.

This is an article from ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review. The authors of the article emphasis the importance of simulation in designing and virtually testing components of computer architecture. They also suggest that simulators can be used as teaching tools for exposing tough to grasp concepts in both the hardware and machine level language that are otherwise impossible to understand. I find this article insightful because it suggests that utilization of such simulators at the architecture level will lead to much more efficient hardware by use of metrics used in virtual performance tests. However, design of accurate enough simulators have proven to be an arduous task, which is addressed by the article.

This is an article from ACM International Conference Proceeding Series; Vol. 8 in the Proceedings of the Australasian conference on Computing education. The authors of the article discuss an initiative that took place at Monash University that was designed to inform secondary school students of the area of digital hardware and computing, including employment opportunity from this area of study. The students were given a project named "Smart House", aptly named because it was to be an automated home system based upon the development of custom hardware and software. I find this article interesting because it is a unique way to introduce an ambiguous area of study, such as "Digital Systems", to students who might not necessarily know what the area of study is. By offering a hands on project to students based in a field that they might have never heard of before, a greater understanding of the opportunities available in this area of study are gained.

This is a panel discussion in the Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges that questions the importance of digital logic for the future of computer science. The discussion is composed of different individuals from different universities who share their own view concerning the foundation of the digital computer. This is a good example of a discussion warning against a great degree of abstraction between the underlying hardware and the high-level developer. The fact is that everything in computer science is built upon the fundamentals of digital logic and without an understanding of this logic, the connection between theory and practice is lost.