CompSOC in Education

The CoMPSoC platform is used for education in a number of courses both at Eindhoven University of Technology and at Delft University of Technology. This makes CoMPSoC more than just a research vehicle, but also a way to  teach students about key concepts of the platform, such as composability and predictability, in a practical manner. Using the platform for teaching purposes also adds requirements on robustness and user friendlyness.

The Embedded System Laboratory (5 ECTS) at the Eindhoven University of Technology has used the CompSOC platform since 2008.

The principles underlying the (first version of the) course are described in the following article: Multi-Processor Programming in the Embedded System Curriculum. Andreas Hansson, Benny Ã…kesson, and Jef van Meerbergen In: Workshop on Embedded Systems Education (WESE), 2008

 

In the past the CompSOC platform was used at the Delft University of Technology for the Embedded Computer Architecture Laboratory (5 ECTS)

The ECA laboratory emphasises on the practical implementation of an application, i.e., a fractal, on an embedded, multi-processor System-on-a-Chip (SOC) platform, prototyped on an FPGA board. Each team is asked to parallelize, map, execute, and optimize the performance and energy consumption of the fractal application on an instance of the CompSOC platform. The assignment consists of five steps, that gradually build up towards a parallelized, optimized implementation on the CompSOC prototype. The implementations of the fractal application in each step are compared to learn how various design choices influence the performance and the energy consumption of the platform. To create a multi-cultural, heterogeneous working environment, that closely resembles the one in current international companies and academic institutes, students work in teams.

The ECA course has been described in the following article: Embedded Computer Architecture Laboratory: A Hands-on Experience Programming Embedded Systems with Resource and Energy Constraints. Andrew Nelson, Anca Molnos, Ashkan Beyranvand Nejad, Davit Mirzoyan, Sorin Cotofana, and Kees Goossens In: Workshop on Embedded Systems Education (WESE), 2012.