research-article

Open access

PyRTL in Early Undergraduate Research

Authors:

Deeksha Dangwal,

Timothy SherwoodAuthors Info & Claims

WCAE'19: Proceedings of the Workshop on Computer Architecture Education

Article No.: 6, Pages 1 - 8

https://doi.org/10.1145/3338698.3338890

Published: 22 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Undergraduate research experiences are a promising way to broaden participation in computer architecture research and have been shown to improve student learning, engagement, and retention. These outcomes can be more profound and lasting if students experience research early. However, there are many barriers to early research in computer architecture some of which include the gap between pedagogy and research, the lower emphasis on hardware design compared to software in first year courses, and the lack of online resources. We propose lowering these barriers through a methodical approach by involving undergraduates in early research and by creating freely available and innovative educational tools for designing hardware.

We present the experience of a team of undergraduate students with research over one academic year using a Python hardware description language, PyRTL. PyRTL was developed to enable early entry into digital design. Its overarching goals are simplicity, usability, clarity, and extensibility, a stark contrast to traditional languages like Verilog and VHDL that have a steep learning curve. Instead of introducing traditional languages early in the undergraduate curriculum, PyRTL takes the opposite approach, which is to build on what students already know well: a popular programming language (Python), software design patterns, and software engineering principles. The students conducted their research in the context of the Early Research Scholars Program (ERSP), a program designed to expand access to research among women and underrepresented minority students in their second year through a well designed support structure.

References

[1]

Archlab, UCSB. https://www.arch.cs.ucsb.edu/prof-sherwood.

[2]

Council on undergraduate research fact sheet. http://www.cur.org/about_cur/fact_sheet/. Accessed: 2016-22-12.

[3]

Survey instrument used in this paper. http://bit.ly/PyRTL-Student-Survey.

[4]

Christine Alvarado. Expanding the pipeline by engaging undergraduates in research UC San Diego Early Research Scholars Program. https://cra.org/expanding-pipeline-engaging-undergraduates-research-uc-san-diego-early-research-scholars-program/. Accessed: 2017-10-02.

[5]

Newsha Ardalani and Lena Olson. Tackling the pipeline problem in the architecture research community. https://www.sigarch.org/tackling-the-pipeline-problem-in-the-architecture-research-community/. Accessed: 2019-05-16.

[6]

Christiaan Baaij, Matthijs Kooijman, Jan Kuper, Arjan Boeijink, and Marco Gerards. C? ash: Structural descriptions of synchronous hardware using haskell. In 2010 13th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design: Architectures, Methods and Tools, pages 714--721. IEEE, 2010.

Digital Library

[7]

Jonathan Bachrach, Huy Vo, Brian Richards, Yunsup Lee, Andrew Waterman, Rimas Avižienis, John Wawrzynek, and Krste Asanović. Chisel: constructing hardware in a scala embedded language. In DAC Design Automation Conference 2012, pages 1212--1221. IEEE, 2012.

Digital Library

[8]

L. Barker. Student and faculty perceptions of undergraduate research experiences in computing. Trans. Comput. Educ., 9(1):5:1--5:28, March 2009.

Digital Library

[9]

Michael Barrow, Shelby Thomas, and Christine Alvarado. Ersp: A structured cs research program for early-college students. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, ITiCSE '16, pages 148--153, New York, NY, USA, 2016. ACM.

Digital Library

[10]

Per Bjesse, Koen Claessen, Mary Sheeran, and Satnam Singh. Lava: hardware design in haskell. In ACM SIGPLAN Notices, volume 34, pages 174--184. ACM, 1998.

Digital Library

[11]

J. Clow, G. Tzimpragos, D. Dangwal, S. Guo, J. McMahan, and T. Sherwood. A pythonic approach for rapid hardware prototyping and instrumentation. In 2017 27th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), pages 1--7, Sep. 2017.

[12]

Jan Decaluwe. Myhdl: a python-based hardware description language. Linux journal, (127):84--87, 2004.

Digital Library

[13]

E. Chung et al. Serving dnns in real time at datacenter scale with project brainwave. IEEE Micro, 38(2):8--20, Mar 2018.

[14]

N. P. Jouppi et al. In-datacenter performance analysis of a tensor processing unit. In 2017 ACM/IEEE 44th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), pages 1--12, June 2017.

Digital Library

[15]

S. R. Gregerman, J. S. Lerner, W. von. Hippel, J. Jonides, and B. A. Nagda. Undergraduate student-faculty research partnerships affect student retention. The Review of Higher Education, 22(1):55--72, 1998.

[16]

Carlos G. Gutierrez, Linda M. Tunstad, Anthony Fratiello, and Scott L. Nickolaisen. Undergraduate research participation increases minority retention and success in chemistry. In Abstracts of Papers, 225th ACS National Meeting, 2003.

[17]

Daniel C Hyde. Using verilog hdl to teach computer architecture concepts. In Proceedings of the 1998 workshop on Computer architecture education, page 10. ACM, 1998.

Digital Library

[18]

Shunning Jiang, Berkin Ilbeyi, and Christopher Batten. Mamba: closing the performance gap in productive hardware development frameworks. In 2018 55th ACM/ESDA/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), pages 1--6. IEEE, 2018.

Digital Library

[19]

D. A. Jimenez and C. Lin. Dynamic branch prediction with perceptrons. In Proceedings HPCA Seventh International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, pages 197--206, Jan 2001.

Digital Library

[20]

L. B. Kish. Moore's law and the energy requirement of computing versus performance. IEE Proceedings - Circuits, Devices and Systems, 151(2):190--194, April 2004.

[21]

Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey E Hinton. Imagenet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. In F. Pereira, C. J. C. Burges, L. Bottou, and K. Q. Weinberger, editors, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25, pages 1097--1105. Curran Associates, Inc., 2012.

Digital Library

[22]

Derek Lockhart, Gary Zibrat, and Christopher Batten. Pymtl: A unified framework for vertically integrated computer architecture research. In Proceedings of the 47th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, pages 280--292. IEEE Computer Society, 2014.

Digital Library

[23]

T. Mudge. Power: A first-class architectural design constraint. Computer, 34:52--58, 04 2001.

Digital Library

[24]

Adam Paszke, Sam Gross, Soumith Chintala, Gregory Chanan, Edward Yang, Zachary DeVito, Zeming Lin, Alban Desmaison, Luca Antiga, and Adam Lerer. Automatic differentiation in pytorch. In NIPS-W, 2017.

[25]

Jeffery R Schultz. The transformational process of mentoring. Council on Undergraduate Research Quarterly, 17:72--73, 2001.

[26]

D. Shin, J. Lee, J. Lee, J. Lee, and H. Yoo. Dnpu: An energy-efficient deep-learning processor with heterogeneous multi-core architecture. IEEE Micro, 38(5):85--93, Sep. 2018.

Digital Library

[27]

Zvonko Vranesic and Stephen Brown. Use of hdls in teaching of computer hardware courses. In Proceedings of the 2003 workshop on Computer architecture education: Held in conjunction with the 30th International Symposium on Computer Architecture, page 16. ACM, 2003.

Digital Library

[28]

Y. Wang, J. Lin, and Z. Wang. An energy-efficient architecture for binary weight convolutional neural networks. IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, 26(2):280--293, Feb 2018.

Digital Library

Cited By

Yilmaz M(2023)Undergraduate Service Course Research Infusion2023 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI)10.1109/CSCI62032.2023.00271(1634-1641)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCI62032.2023.00271
Wang YJalalitabar MFierson J(2022)Summer Research with Undergraduate Students: A Multi-Thread DesignProceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Information Technology Education10.1145/3537674.3554744(57-62)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3537674.3554744
Landgraf JYang TLin WRossbach CSchkufza ESherwood TBerger EKozyrakis C(2021)Compiler-driven FPGA virtualization with SYNERGYProceedings of the 26th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/3445814.3446755(818-831)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3445814.3446755
Show More Cited By

PyRTL in Early Undergraduate Research
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs

Recommendations

Relevant real-world undergraduate research problems: lessons from the nsf-reu trenches
SIGCSE '10: Proceedings of the 41st ACM technical symposium on Computer science education

Projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program aim to (a) enhance participation of students who otherwise might not have research opportunities, and (b) increase the number of students ...
Bringing Undergraduate Research Experience in Non-R1 Institutions
SIGCSE '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in computer science undergraduate research activities at colleges and universities nationwide. Developing and maintaining undergraduate research benefits students, faculty mentors, and the institution. ...
Successfully Engaging Early Undergraduates in CS Research: (Abstract Only)
SIGCSE '18: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

Engaging undergraduates in research has been shown to improve retention, increase students' sense of science identity, and increase the chances that they will continue to graduate school. Yet many undergraduates don't participate in research until very ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WCAE'19: Proceedings of the Workshop on Computer Architecture Education

June 2019

70 pages

ISBN:9781450368421

DOI:10.1145/3338698

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 June 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Funding Sources

National Science Foundation

Conference

ISCA '19

Sponsor:

SIGARCH

ISCA '19: The 46th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture

June 22, 2019

AZ, Phoenix, USA

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 9 of 10 submissions, 90%

Upcoming Conference

ISCA '25

Sponsor:
sigarch

The 52nd Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture

June 21 - 25, 2025

Tokyo , Japan

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

4
Total Citations
View Citations
490
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)93
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)15

Reflects downloads up to 01 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Yilmaz M(2023)Undergraduate Service Course Research Infusion2023 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI)10.1109/CSCI62032.2023.00271(1634-1641)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCI62032.2023.00271
Wang YJalalitabar MFierson J(2022)Summer Research with Undergraduate Students: A Multi-Thread DesignProceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Information Technology Education10.1145/3537674.3554744(57-62)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3537674.3554744
Landgraf JYang TLin WRossbach CSchkufza ESherwood TBerger EKozyrakis C(2021)Compiler-driven FPGA virtualization with SYNERGYProceedings of the 26th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems10.1145/3445814.3446755(818-831)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3445814.3446755
Alvarado CGray AMirza DTjoa MSherriff MMerkle LCutter PMonge ASheard J(2021)The Role of Mentoring in a Dual-Mentored Scalable CS Research ProgramProceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3408877.3432364(945-951)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3408877.3432364

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents