Seminar (B/M)

Caching is arguably the most important concept in computer science, from operating the Internet all the way down to the devices implementing the required functionality. This seminar focuses on the hardware level and participants shall try to figure out what is actually going on in Silicon.

Students will be assigned a scientific paper on a specific cache-related topic which they have to present in class. Additionally, they are expected to develop a little program demonstrating the concept on their local computer. Thus the grade depends on the following 3 components:

1. Proficiency in the assigned topic
2. Transfer of the theory into a concrete experiment
3. Presentation of concept and results

Potential assignments are

• Cache hierarchy and reverse engineering its parameters
• Hardware prefetching mechanisms and evasion strategies
• The Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) and its role in memory access
• Cache side-channel attacks
• Cache compression
• Cache coherence protocols
• Cache-conscious programming and cache-oblivious algorithms