KylanRobinson.com

I made some significant progress in my master’s thesis research this weekend. First of all, I was able to fix some bugs in the code and verify that all of the low-level functionality works correctly. This meant tackling some intimidating problems that had been hanging over my head for weeks. Fortunately, I was able to develop a clean and elegant solution and tie up the loose ends.

The second big piece of news is that I’ve started writing the actual thesis document. I completed the entire first chapter and wrote a draft of the second. Here’s my tentative outline for the finished product:

Introduction

Part One : Context

-Background

-Past Research

-Motivation and Guiding Principles

Part Two : Application Overview

-Program Flow Description

-Software Architecture

-Use Case Scenario

Part Three : Implementation

-Architecture Algorithms

-Mapping Algorithms

-Novel Features

Conclusion and Future Work

Appendices

-Verification and Testing

-Portability and Extensibility

-Requirements, Packaging, and Installation

-User Guide

“Everything is so simple!” The more I use Python, the more I like it. This comic from XKCD illustrates why.

After some hard work, I finally finished my paper, Fault Avoidance in Medium-Grain Reconfigurable Hardware Architectures. Yesterday I submitted it to the International Conference on Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms (ERSA), which is part of WORLDCOMP. For this conference, notification of acceptance will be sent out on April 5th.

Today I’m working implementing memory structures in my spoc research project. General information regarding the design of these structures can be found here.

I have begun the process of designing a user interface for my research. Here’s a screen shot of what I have so far. It is still very rough, and probably much different than what the final product will look like.