Honours projects 2008

Projects supervised by Bernhard Scholz

Design and implementation of a numerical Co-Processor with FPGA
FPGAs become faster and have an increasing number of gates such that they provide a practical means to implement high-performance algorithms. This project is a pilot project to design and develop a numerical co-processor for the TS-7300 board from Technologic Systems. This board consists of a 200MhZ ARM processor and an Altera 2C8 Cyclone II FPGA. The project should focus on a high-performance data bus between CPU and FPGA, re-using existing numerical IP Cores from OpenCores, and the integration with the operating system (i.e. Linux) and standard numerical libraries. Students should be experienced with VHDL/Verilog and systems programming.

Programming the Cell Processor with the Playstation 3
The Cell Processor implements a new computer architecture that consists of two PowerPC cores and 8 Synergistic Processor Elements (SPE). The SPEs are freely programmable high-performance vector machines. The aim of this project is to implement a parallel clustering algorithm on the PS3. The performance of the Cell processor should be compared with an implementation on a standard PC. Students should be experienced with C/C++ programming.

Programming the General Purpose Graphical Processing Units (GPUs)
With the increasing programmability of commodity graphics processing units (GPUs) in high-performance graphics card, high-speed computations can be performed at very low cost. The aim of this project is to implement parallel algorithms including linear equation solving and the simplex algorithm. The aim of this project is to implement parallel algorithms including linear equation solving and the simplex algorithm. The performance of the algorithm running on the CPU should be compared with an implementation on a standard PC. Students should be experienced with C/C++ programming and should have an understanding of linear algebra.

Time Synchronization for SunSPOTS
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are an emerging technology for automatic and continuous monitoring of physical phenomena. The applications of WSN include habitat monitoring, structural monitoring, and traffic control. The Sun(TM) Small Programmable Object Technology (SPOT) is a new sensor network hardware that runs a Java VM and is produced by Sun Microsystems(TM). For this platform a distributed query processing has been programmed at the School of Information Technologies. The distributed query systems needs to be extended with an improved communication system that finds better tree topologies for time synchronization. Students should be experienced with Java, embedded systems, and algorithms.