Course Development

This fall, I will teach a senior undergraduate / graduate course in Parallel and Distributed Simulation Systems for the second time. In this course, students will gain the necessary background knowledge for starting research in this area. The primary focus of this course is on the design and implementation of parallel/distributed simulations systems and will allow the immediate dissemination of research results produced by this research project. Additionally, top students from this course will be recruited to join the reverse computation, parallel simulation project. Last year over 40 students took the course. This fall I anticipate an even higher enrollment. One of the key findings from teaching this course is that students find developing reversible simulations models a very challenging and exciting exercise. They impress me continuously with how far they are able to push their models to be reversible and not degenerate to classic state-saving techniques.

In addition to teaching reverse computation to senior undergraduate and gradate students, I plan to introduce these concepts on a regular basis to sophomore students taking my Computer Organization course. During the Spring 2000 and 2001 semesters, I conducted trial group projects to determine if sophomore CS students could grasp the concepts of reverse computation. Student groups were assigned the task of designing the low-level control and datapath for a simple reversible microprocessor. This project was designed to help them understand how the low level structures of a microprocessor are used to process a single assemble language instruction. For the project, students were given a subset of the Pendulum Instruction Set Architecture [40] to implement. The overall results from this experiment where positive as was the reaction among students. All groups completed the project and project scores were very high. One Computer Science exchange student expressed that this project was the most interesting and fun he had been assigned since coming to Rensselaer.