things i will miss...

In just a few hours from now, I'm going to have my first exam paper this semester. The feeling? Maybe since it's already my fourth year, I didn't feel anything about exams, they are just the regular things which come and go every end of semester, and I'm trying my best as always. Thank God for the wonderful 4 years which I spent on campus. They will be unforgettable years for me.. Many tears, many blessings, many unexpected events, many things which have changed me. I'm reflecting on myself 4 years back and compare it with my current self, some things stay the same, many more are transformed (I use the word "transformed" here since the "4-years-ago-me" would not ever imagine "that-me" becomes like the "current-me"). Yeah, and I'm going to miss many things:

1. the fellowship which has brought me to come into faith with Jesus, which has introduced me to how beautiful His grace is... all of the encouragement, prayers and sharing that we have altogether
2. the thump-thump-feeling of knowing the result of assignments and mid-term test, and the jaw-dropping moment when knowing that your result was below the class' average! that was A DISASTER hahahaha. I remember my first mid-term test in NUS, I got only 5 out of 15 and the average was 9 or something.. All my prides were torn apart and throughout these years, I'm learning to lean more and more on Him and giving my best..
   
3. all the excitements and joy of having finish exams and going back home, meeting family and old friends!
   
4. a-rush-of-blood-to-the-head when you know that the deadline is just several hours away and you kept staring at the monitor not knowing what to type or what to do and no one was even available to help you!
   
5. all the chit-chats with friends over lunch or dinner in the campus' canteen, this was our escape from the hectic lectures and tutorials, spending one hour or so over the table hahahaha.
   
6. reading weeks! it was one of a few time in the semester where all of us went on becoming hermits inside the library! lolz

anyway moving on to the next topic hehe

Final Year Project Presentation
And last but not least, last week I went for a "tour" to some of my friends' FYP presentations. I was there to offer them my support and prayer. So here they are:

Ardi's


Stephanie's


Hartanto's


Yunika's


Me

I believe that all of us have done our best, and let God do the rest now..
All the best for the exams everyone!

optimize application for ibm cell processor

That goes the title of my final year project. Finally today, I submitted everything, three copies of my final report plus a CD containing the source code! It was a long two semesters project, yet it's interesting because I had a chance to explore a new processor architecture which was released in 2005. It is called the IBM Cell Broadband Engine Architecture (IBM Cell BE, or Cell processor for short), which was jointly developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM. The development process itself was started in March 2001 and upon its release, the Cell processor is used to power up Sony PlayStation 3 machine.

This processor is developed for multimedia and game applications as well as other numerically intensive workloads. It provides support both for highly parallel codes, which have high computation and memory requirements, and for scalar codes, for which fast response time and a full-featured programming environment. The Cell BE architecture provides both flexibility and high performance by utilizing a 64-bit multithreaded Power Processor Element (PPE) with two levels of globally coherent cache and eight Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs), each consisting of a processor designed for streaming workloads, a local memory, and a globally coherent DMA engine.

an example of the rendering of a high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) tone-mapped image

So, this project itself attempted to optimize a non-trivial but interesting application, which is OpenEXR, a high dynamic-range (HDR) image library, on the Cell platform. The library is optimized to use all the available resources of the Cell processor. In order to achieve this some optimization methods (such as function inlining, branch predication, and loop unrolling) and vectorization with SIMD instructions are done as well as parallelization of execution with multiple Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs) in order to fully utilize the SPEs in the IBM Cell BE. This project has managed to successfully achieved speedup factor of 1.94 and 1.26 respectively for pixel data writing and reading process and if the time for data initialization is assumed to be negligible, the speedup factor achieved for both processes are 3.25 and 1.88 respectively.

the result of my FYP is captured in this one graph, hehe

So basically that's for the technical thingy. I felt that in the past two months, I've done much more than what I've done from September last year to February this year hahaha. All things that I've done in the last semester seem to be a waste since most of them didn't really go into my final deliverable. However, there are many interesting experience that I get from this FYP. Here's a list of things which I did for the first time (in my life!) during this fyp period: fell asleep in the lab till the following morning, drank four cups of coffee in one day, spent most of my day in the lab, and didn't talk (chatting doesn't count :P) to anyone for one day. On average, I spent 12 hours a day in front of the computer and sleep for only 5 hours a day, hahaha what a life. Here are some photos that remind me of all the time I spent doing this FYP...

the entrance to my lab..


see all the rubbish accumulated in front of my lab

my workstation in the lab


back to my room


delicious nastar from my mom which accompanied me for a week :P


I'm a coffee addict!


first draft..


got a playstation 3 machine, and installed linux in it haha


final submission!

So, I still have to prepare for the presentation in front of two examiners, it will be on 20 April. Some assignments are waiting to be "touched" :P, and finally exams, will be my last 3 exams in NUS, gotta enjoy hahaha..

final year project's presentation

Monday 20, APR 2009
Afternoon Parallel Sessions, 2pm to 5pm

Session Name/Venue: Computer Architecture - 1, SR5 (COM1/2-01)
S/N: 33
Proj. ID: H062190
Title: Optimize Application for IBM Cell Processor
Supervisor: tulika
Co-Supervisor: -
Student: Johannes Ardiant Harlie
Time Slot for Presentation: 4.15 - 5.00pm
Evaluator 1: thiagu
Evaluator 2: wongwf