Systems Evaluation Lab
198:500 Seminar (1 credit), Spring 2021
Hybrid: Remote and In-Person

COVID-19 In-Person Instructions

Rutgers now requires all students, faculty, and staff who will be on campus regularly to participate in weekly SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) testing. All students enrolled in this course and planning to participate in in-person instructional activities must participate in weekly testing.

More information can be found at: On Campus Testing website. If you have questions, please conduct Student Health at 848-932-7402 or health@rutgers.edu.

Each day before you arrive on campus, you must complete the brief survey on the My Campus Pass symptom checker self-screening app.

Masks must be worn by all persons on campus when in the presence of others (within six feet) and in buildings in non-private enclosed settings (e.g., common workspaces, workstations, meeting rooms, classrooms, etc.). Masks must be worn during class meetings; any student not wearing a mask will be asked to leave.

Announcements

Description

This seminar will allow students to get familiar with different performance metrics commonly used to assess benefits of hardware/software optimizations and system configurations. This lab will cover power, energy, execution time, and temperature as system evaluation metrics. The seminar will have two projects where students will perform physical measurements, and evaluate these measurements in the context of different utilized hardware/software resources. This includes single and multi-threaded program executions on a multi-core system with an embedded GPU accelerator.

The hardware platform that we use as our system to be measured is the Jetson TX-1 board. It combines a quad-core ARM architecture with a 256 core GPU on a single chip. For voltage and current measurements, we will use the SDM3045X digital multimeter. We will also provide an additional infrastructure to allow temperature measurements. This is a one credit course.

Staff

Lectures (remote) and Labs (in-person)

lectures : Friday, February 26 and March 1 (online only)
lab :

Read/Post Questions

Please post questions regarding homeworks and projects using Rutgers's Sakai system and piazza . DO NOT send project questions directly to me. THANKS!

Lecture Notes

Videos of the lectures are available on our sakai site under Resources.

Projects

For the projects, we use equipment accessible through machines in the ilab cluster. The ilab cluster machines contains the listing of valid hostnames available for projects. You have the same home directory across all machines of the ilab cluster . However, to access the multimeter, you have to log into one of these four machines: ilabu1.cs.rutgers.edu, ilabu2.cs.rutgers.edu, ilabu3.cs.rutgers.edu, or ilabu4.cs.rutgers.edu. To initialize the multimeter, you can either download the setup.scpi file here, or copy and paste text below into the setup.scpi file.

CONF:CURR:DC 6A
SENS:CURR:DC:NPLC 1
TRIG:BUS
TRIG:COUN 750
TRIG:DEL +2.33333333E-03

Please watch our Lab Station Tutorial before going to the lab. The quickshift project description contains detailed instructions about how to log into the board, and how to acquire measurement data. Please read carefully. Both project reports are due on Wednesday, April 21, at 11:59pm . Please submit via sakai. Good luck!