1. What I've done in past 6 months
Wen-Long Yang

2. Courses in this semester
Advanced Compiler
Focus on how gcc works.
Gives us an outline of the implementation of gcc
Learn from examples.
Project : prefetch of pointer-based data structure.
Advanced Computer Architecture
I/O Devices and Driver Design
Entrance to linux kernel and driver development

3. Paper presentation Reading
When we are difficult to understand the content of a paper, we can try to find other information in the internet or read other papers of the same subject.
Try to find out the main idea of the paper

4. Gentoo Linux
Peculiarity: Instead of being downloaded from internet directly, packages are built from source codes and be optimized by users.
We must choose a good combination of flags to let gcc compile the source codes.
May get better performance or suit our request
Take a lot of time to download the source code and compile
Issues:
Does the cflags we choose really influence the stability?
Is the performance of gentoo linux really better than that of other distribution? If yes, how much speedup can we gain?

5. Next Semester… Learn parallel computing Multi-core processors
Motivation:
group meeting: heterogeneous v.s. homogeneous processors
Paper survey & reading
Course: Multicores and Their Compilation
Multimedia coding and computer architecture
Course: information theory and coding techniques
Survey papers of other subjects…
Learn more actively