legv8sim: The Creation and Evaluation of an Assembly Development Toolchain

Presenter

Anvitha L. Ramachandran

Campus

UMass Amherst

Sponsor

Jeremy Joel Gummeson, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UMass Amherst

Schedule

Session 2, 11:30 AM - 12:15 PM [Schedule by Time][Poster Grid for Time/Location]

Location

Poster Board A76, Campus Center Auditorium, Row 4 (A61-A80) [Poster Location Map]

Abstract

A profound understanding of hardware organization is necessary to the computer engineering curriculum because of its ubiquity in the field. Textbooks about the subject use toy languages that have minimal instruction sets and variances in their specification to illustrate the concepts but maintain a high degree of similarity to real-world assembly to facilitate students’ transition to industry and research. The industry and academic support for these commonplace variants of assembly are vast and long-spanning, but for these toy variants, the distinguishing characteristics make it difficult to adapt existing solutions to the toy ones, which results in necessity for concentrated effort in developing effective instruction strategies for these toy languages. The lack of such tools that target students developing in assembly makes it extremely difficult for faculty teaching courses in this area to develop exercises that focus on effective program writing. This research aims to address the gaps in availability of toolchains for assembly development in LEGV8 specifically. LEGV8 is an Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) that was first defined in Computer Organization and Design ARM Edition: The hardware software interface, by David Patterson and John Hennessy, and it is the ISA that is used in UMass’s Hardware Organization and Digital Design (ECE 331) course. The research question for this thesis is “How does access to a broader development toolchain impact computer engineering students’ ability to develop assembly in the context of an introductory computer architecture course?

Keywords

assembly, instruction, simulator, debugging, programming methodology

Research Area

Engineering

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