Of Cycles and more!!!

Warm regards, been almost 2 weeks since my last post! What was I doing? Well, something interesting, something so interesting that over the last 2 weeks, the only thing I was obsessed with was CYCLES (that is Processor cycles!!, btw)

Enrolled as a Computer Engineering student, here at TU Delft, I have to take 'Modern Computer Architecture' as a compulsory subject. For a change, the word 'Modern'  is true in the literal sense, since we are working with the latest MIPS 64-bit architecture (btw, just as background info, MIPS architecture was developed at Stanford by two people, one of whom is a Prof. at Berkeley now). My partner for this course is a guy from Berkeley (Kristian), who had already taken this exact course during his undergrad! (but his Prof. then, was the guy who wrote the book we use as reference text here!!). For an assignment which was due last Friday, we had to write MIPS code for a specific problem statement. The challenging part of the assignment was to optimize the code to make it run faster than the rest of the class (now this is *the best* part of the assignment, because, no matter how much you optimize your code to make it run fast, theres always someone who does it better! and then you push harder). The assignment took a lot of time, long sleepless nights and a lot of frustration (when nothing seemed to work), which finally culminated into a nice, elegant and fast code working to our satisfaction. The best part of this whole experience was that we both (I and Kristian) started out separately writing our own versions of the code, sharing ideas along the way and ended breaking all benchmarks taking the battle between us to new heights everytime!! It was amusing to look at how we implemented our codes in so different styles, helping each other to improve our versions of the code and still having a real fight for 'whose code runs faster?'. In the end, we ended up with very competitive cycle times, but realized that the competition between us actually helped us perform better than what we could have individually! 

The entire week spent on working out this assignment was surely worth the effort! Awesome fun it turned out to be, but the mental fatigue and boredom (caused by staring at the screen for hours to figure out how to eliminate a RAW hazard), just made the weekend look even more refreshing!! :) We had a Van Hasseltlaan weekend party (with me displaying some skills in making Egg Burji and Omlette for everyone!) followed by a party in Leiden till 3 AM !! :)

My 'To Do' list has sadly grown out of proportion, and is going to take some time and effort to catch up! Blogging would a little more difficult, but I'll try my best! (I'll never forget a particular remark by one of my best friends, 'If you want to do something, you *will* find time to do it'. I was very skeptical of this, but not anymore! :) Thanks Anvay)

Cheers,

Anand