Student Summer Research Project
The Australian Semiconductor Technology Company (ASTC) and the University
of Adelaide are co-sponsoring a student research project to further enhance a
fast instruction set simulator. The project will run for six-weeks over the
summer break. The student awarded the subject will be paid a stipend
of $2400. Engineering students can count work on the project toward their
work-experience requirements.
All students intending to undertake honours projects in Computer Science,
Software Engineering or Electrical Engineering at Adelaide next year are
eligible. There is strong potential to extend this project into honours research.
Details of the project are posted below. To apply, or for further information
please contact Brad Alexander(brad@cs.adelaide.edu.au)
in the School of Computer Science.
Project title: Enhancing a Fast Instruction Set Simulator
Project Summary:
Instruction Set Simlators (ISS's) are virtual machines that can execute
binary code for one hardware platform on a different hardware platform.
ISS's help speed product development by allowing the software for new
hardware to be tested before that hardware is complete. To make
early software development feasible the ISS must be both accurate
and fast. Writing fast and reliable ISS's is a challenging and very interesting
problem.
This project aims to further improve the performance of QEMU, a fast open-source
ISS, in running binary code written in ARM assembler on a desktop PC.
QEMU works by performing very fast just-in-time compilation of the original binary
into blocks of target code which are then executed direct by the target machine.
Though this process is very good at producing running code quickly there is
still room to improve the quality of the code that QEMU produces by using
spare processor cores to perform further optimisation to code blocks
while QEMU is running. Earlier work has shown that such a process is practical
and capable of producing better performance. The goal of this project is to extend
this process to make it more pervasive and, perhaps, responsive to the needs of each
application.
This project is sponsored by the Australian Semiconductor Technology Company (ASTC).
Students working on the project will be co-supervised by staff experienced in building
and using ISS's to help meet the needs of customers worldwide. This work is on-going
and there is strong potential to extend this project into honours research.
|
