Need ideas for FYP

I am student of Bachelors and going to start my FYP in some days. I am going into the field of high computation in verilog. These are some projects which I might be doing:
1.the n-body gravitational problem
2.Oceanic modeling
3.Cancer biology modeling

Any other projects you might suggest that may be beneficial for me.
And also my main aim after Bachelors is to get admission in some US university.
Thanks!

 

And also, I have spartan 6 xc6slx45 kit available in college Lab.

 

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

awaish2011@namal.edu.pk wrote:

I am student of Bachelors and going to start my FYP in some days.
I am going into the field of high computation in verilog.

There has been work for years on doing computationally intensive
problems in FPGAs, much of it hasn't worked out very well.

One problem is that it is hard to do economically. That is, such
that someone will buy the product.

These are some projects which I might be doing:

1.the n-body gravitational problem
2.Oceanic modeling
3.Cancer biology modeling

I was once thinking about doing a biology related problem, and
decided that I could do it with 2000 of the largest S3 FPGAs.
That was still a little too big at the time.

There are some interesting projects out there, but you have to
compete with the non-FPGA based solutions, and the fact that the
actual solution might not be needed.

For example, the n-body problem might be useful to those at
NASA trying to get rockets to far away planets. But being able
to do 0.1% or 1% better (in fuel use or arrival time) isn't worth
all that much. You have to be able to do a lot better to make
it worth spending money on.

Any other projects you might suggest that may be beneficial for me.
And also my main aim after Bachelors is to get admission in some
US university.

Planning ahead is useful. The projects you mention will take teams
of researchers years to work on. (You have to include packaging
and software and user manuals, so that ordinary people can use them.)

For a more reasonably sized project, implement a character based
computer terminal. That is, a keyboard, display, and serial port.
(Note that many FPGA boards have the hardware to do this.)

In years long past, it wasn't an unusual undergraduate project
built out of a microprocessor and TTL parts. Now, it should
be a reasonable sized FPGA project.

You can separately work on the keyboard input, UART (find one
on opencores, but you still have to figure out how to use it),
and character based raster display. You have to get the timing
right for an available video monitor.

-- glen

 

[mnentwig]

Hi,

verilog.

These are some projects which I might be doing:
spartan 6 xc6slx45 kit

1.the n-body gravitational problem
2.Oceanic modeling
3.Cancer biology modeling

this is not to discourage you. But please be warned that heavy-duty FPG
implementations as youre planning are

*much*

and I mean "much" harder than it looks from all those shiny webpages tha
make it look like Lego bricks because they want to sell you stuff.

Here's my proposal: Why don't you implement "Hello world!" in Morse code
Which is ".... . .-.. .-.. --- .-- --- .-. .-.. -.. "
Just a blinking LED.
Expect that i'll take between a day and two weeks. This includes thing
that "should" be easy but are not, such as installing ISE 14.7 when you'v
never done it before, making the JTAG interface work etc.

In my personal opinion, the xc6slx45 is an excellent choice to get started
Because
a) it does not require a Xilinx license to program it
b) I can get one cheaply if you ever need one, i.e. "Numato Saturn" o
"Pipistrello" boards, for ~$130..160.
c) If it breaks, it's no big deal, compared to a $3000+ board.
To learn Verilog, the smallest and cheapest FPGA will do, if you decide t
buy one for yourself. The typical feedback from the board is "this doesn'
work - go simulate some more".

Note, you said "Verilog", not using some intermediate wizardry tha
generates the code. For the latter, a sxl45 is probably too smal
(guessing, haven't done it myself).

---------------------------------------
Posted through http://www.FPGARelated.com

 

[mnentwig]

>> b) I can get one cheaply if you ever need one
heh that was supposed to read "-you- can get one cheaply". I don't run
shop

---------------------------------------
Posted through http://www.FPGARelated.com

 

[mnentwig]

maybe this still, before someone quotes me later:
When I say the FPGA you mentioned is an "excellent choice", I meant fo
_learning_, as you can use it on your own PC without $2999 license. Not fo
high performance computing.
Spartan 6 is marketed with "delivers an optimal balance of low risk, lo
cost, and low power for cost-sensitive applications".

---------------------------------------
Posted through http://www.FPGARelated.com

 

[rickman]

On 10/13/2014 12:09 PM, awaish2011@namal.edu.pk wrote:

I am student of Bachelors and going to start my FYP in some days. I am going into the field of high computation in verilog. These are some projects which I might be doing:
1.the n-body gravitational problem
2.Oceanic modeling
3.Cancer biology modeling

Any other projects you might suggest that may be beneficial for me.
And also my main aim after Bachelors is to get admission in some US university.
Thanks!

How about something a little more practical? I expect there is not much
room for improvement for solving gravitational problems much faster or
more accurately. Is there really a need?

Oceanic modeling is a huge area. You might want to narrow the focus on
that one a *lot* more before you try to narrow your list... or just
remove it.

Cancer biology modeling is also a *huge* area. I do recall some years
ago there was a small project at NIH (if I remember correctly) who was
working on a real time interactive model of complex molecules. They
would model the forces of a molecule and let the researcher use a pair
of many degrees of freedom controls to bend and twist the molecule while
getting haptic feedback. I'm not sure what happened to this project as
I haven't seen anywhere that it became a widely useful tool.
Interesting though.

An area I find interesting is low power processing. You might consider
what it takes to do something with a minimum of power consumption using
off the shelf devices. There are a lot of potential applications there.

--

Rick

 

[Petter Gustad]

Theo Markettos <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:

All I'm saying is that verilog/VHDL are insufficiently high levels of
abstraction for architectural exploration. I'm not saying all HDLs/HLS are

I agree. I rarely do architectural exploration in HDL. I will typically
use some HLL like Common Lisp or Matlab for such purpose. Sometimes I'm
lucky and can even turn the architectural model into a DSL which can
generate HDL, if not implement the architecture in HDL/HLS.

> However if they need heavy floating point, like a lot of scientific compute,

BTW The Arria 10 has hard FP DSP blocks. Many DSP engineers seem to use
FP out of habit since that's what they are used to from their DSP
processors and what they use in Matlab. But of course some applications
actually need FP.

this starts eating up area rapidly. If they're memory-bound, then you're up
against the limits of DDR3, which is a lot less bandwidth than GDDR5. Or if

An advantage of the FPGA that you're *not* limited by DDR3. If you
have heavy bandwidth requirements you might want to use serial memory
like MoSys Bandwidth Engine or even HMC.

you want to do iterative development: many-hours FPGA synthesis times are
not conducive.

For iterative development I spend more time using the simulator. For
continous integration with software one are bound by FPGA synthesis and
P&R time.


//Petter
--
..sig removed by request.

 

[Mike Field]

On Friday, 17 October 2014 00:55:22 UTC+13, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:

The idea of dynamic programming is that if you make the optimal
decision at each point, you find the globally optimal solution.

I'm not so sure dynamic programming is really needed. There are all these fancy FSM based dynamic programming solutions, and everybody is missing the obvious - that dynamic programming is a crutch used by CPU matchers because they can't score an (almost) arbitrary long match all at the same time.

So I think that there is scope for final year paper, to take a massively parallel approach to DNA matching by making things simpler - not just by re-implementing CPU algorithms in an FPGA.

Mike

 

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Mike Field <mikefield1969@gmail.com> wrote:

(snip, I wrote)

The idea of dynamic programming is that if you make the optimal
decision at each point, you find the globally optimal solution.

(snip)

I'm not so sure dynamic programming is really needed. There are
all these fancy FSM based dynamic programming solutions,
and everybody is missing the obvious - that dynamic programming
is a crutch used by CPU matchers because they can't score
an (almost) arbitrary long match all at the same time.

Well, I suppose it isn't because most people aren't using it.

Most often, you can get a long enough exact match to use a
simpler either hash based or FSM based search.

If you can get 90% of the matches in 10% of the time, that is
often good enough.

In some cases, though, the less exact matches are the most
interesting, and so might be missed. There might be lots of data
in GenBank that could be searched though and find unknown
matches.

So I think that there is scope for final year paper, to take
a massively parallel approach to DNA matching by making things
simpler - not just by re-implementing CPU algorithms in an FPGA.

The actual story is that BLAST was written to show that hardware
based methods aren't needed. But again, 90% of the matches,
and maybe 10% of the time.

-- glen