Network Computer For Computer Architecture Education: A Progress Report

Computer engineers increasingly depend on the use of software tools to evaluate and investigate the design of computer systems. It is therefore very important that educators in this eld promote extensive tool-based experimentation by students. However, the integration of today's complex tools into curricula poses several challenges to instructors. To deploy a tool-based class experiment, they must (1) obtain access to hardware resources that meet the requirements of the tool, and obtain access to student accounts on these resources; (2) install and maintain the tool (software and documentation); (3) develop education content (tutorials, assignments) to be used in class. If many tools are intended to be used throughout the semester, the overheads are magni ed in proportion to the number of needed tools. Furthermore, it becomes important to (4) guarantee that tools are presented to students with user-friendly interfaces. This paper describes how these challenges are addressed by a universally accessible NETwork-computer for Computer Architecture Research and Education NETCARE that provides educators with a Web portal to access computing resources, executable tools and educational material. This infrastructure has been used in computer architecture and parallel programming classes for three years; the experience obtained from its extensive usage has motivated several improvements in the infrastructure which are described in this paper. In terms of hardware This work was partially funded by the National Science Foundation under grants EIA-9975275 and EIA-9872516, by an academic reinvestment grant from Purdue University, and by the Comision Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnologia, Spain (TIC98-1162-C02-02). Dr. Miguel-Alonso's stay at Purdue University is supported by the Secretaria de Estado de Universidades, Investigacion y Desarrollo, Spain. Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright c 2001, American Society for Engineering Education resources, new interfaces to cluster management systems allow access to a large number of processing nodes of supercomputers and networks of workstations. In terms of content, new applications are available on NETCARE, including tools for explicitly-parallel instruction set architectures. In terms of user interfaces, a new speci cation language allows for increased exibility in the generation of dynamic Web-based tool interfaces. These features are enabled by a new version (5.0) of the underlying PUNCH network-computing infrastructure.