• 2020-04-02 Public course page launched and course internal PANDA page created

In this seminar, we look at research articles on parallel computing architectures including multicore CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and custom architectures. Guided by a set of common research questions, the goal of this seminar is to extract the very specific knowledge from individual research papers and to integrate it into a structured body of general computer architecture knowledge.

The technical focus will be on the parallelism of different architectures, how the designs achieve the parallelism and how it can be quantified. The seminar literature also provides insights for which workloads the type and amount of parallelism is usable and in which scenarios it can not be exploited.

The methodical focus of this seminar will be on practical methods and process knowledge about scientific reading and writing. The seminar will build upon on exercises and insights from the teaching education program "teaching how to write". Small practical exercises will provide different tools how to approach the tasks of understanding academic articles from the domain of computer architecture, of writing own summaries and reviews on them, and how to provide feedback to peer writers.

Due to the Corona virus pandemic, the seminar will be starting as pure online course within PANDA. Depending on the developing epidemic and technical situation, intermediate or final presentations may be performed in on-site sessions, live video sessions, or individual videos.

• 6 April 2020 - 19 April 2020: Preparation phase on LaTeX, online tools and PANDA. Exploration of tools and participation in PANDA forum discussions is highly encouraged, but not strictly required at this point.
• 20 April 2020 - 17 July 2020: Weekly online tasks with online submissions in PANDA. Tasks will be released by Wednesday morning, submissions required by Monday night. Late submissions will receive no or reduced credit, but valid submissions for every task are required to pass the seminar.
• Tentative release date for first task: Wednesday 22 April, submission deadline: Monday 27 April

The seminar builds on knowledge from Bachelor and Master-level courses in the area of computer engineering, such as Computer Architecture, Digital Design, Reconfigurable Computing, or High-Performance Computing. Having attended these courses is not a strict precondition. But you should have at least a good general understanding in one of these areas.

The seminar will be taught in English.