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
- Please see a short introductory
video describing the class.
- An updated version of the quickshift project description has been
posted (see bottom of this web page). Please watch the
LabTutorialVideo and read the second project
description to learn about the correct use of our measurement equipment.
- Project reports submission deadline: Wednesday, April
21, at 11:59pm.
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
- Ulrich (Uli) Kremer
(uli@cs.rutgers.edu)
Office: CoRE 318
Office hours: Wednesdays 9:30-10:30am; will be held online, not in-person
Lectures (remote) and Labs (in-person)
lectures : Friday, February 26 and March 1 (online only)
lab :
- Location: Hill 254
- Lab times: Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday, 1:00-5;00pm, 2 hour slots,
sign-up required through our google doc spread sheet
- First lab: Tuesday, March 2; last lab: Thursday, April 8
- Requires an ilab account; You should bring your own
laptop
- You must follow posted lab safety procedures
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.
- Friday, February 26, 2021 -- Lecture 1
Course overview, Covid-19 safety procedures, projects and equipment overview
- Monday, March 1, 2021 -- Lecture 2
Demonstration how to log into development boards; project discussion;
sign-up sheet
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!
- Develop "stress" tests for peak power.
Write your program in any language that is
supported on the TX-1 boards. The program should run at least 3
seconds.
You should submit a 1-2 page
report in PDF format. Include your stresser code in the description.
- Software/hardware system
evaluation: Program running on single core, multiple cores, or
the GPU.
You should submit your 3-5 page report in PDF format.