CS 194 Research Proposal Paul Salzman Advisor: Professor Glenn Reinman Winter 2007

Outline  Motivation  Previous Work  Objective  Approach  Summary

Interactive Entertainment  Simulates virtual worlds with objects and characters that interact.  Large computational requirements with the increasing demand for realism.  Interactions previously relied on predefined animations.  Real time physics engines currently used to dynamically calculate interactions.

Previous Work: ParallAX  Multiple core architecture designed to handle the real time physics calculations.  Dedicated to only one of many demanding aspects.  Large set of resources that could be allocated to other portions of IE.

Objective  To investigate different methods of utilizing the ParallAX hardware and determining if and how it can be used as a polymorphic IE architecture.

Approach  Develop a simulator using SESC with MINT 4-8 weeks  Create various workloads for the simulated architecture 1-2 weeks  Analyze performance to determine how different resource allocations can be applied. 8+ weeks

Step 1: Simulator  Develop a simulator using SESC A cycle accurate architectural simulator Uses MINT  4-8 weeks

Step 2: Workloads  Create various workloads for the simulated architecture using different IE requirements Ex: Artificial Intelligence, scene graphs  1-2 weeks

Step 3: Performance Analysis  Analyze ParallAX performance under the various workloads.  Determine bottlenecks  Find how different resource allocations affect performance.  8+ weeks

Check Point Goals  By the checkpoint presentation A functional simulator Various workloads for the simulated architecture