Teaching TAs To Teach: Strategies for TA Training

"The only thing that scales with undergrads is undergrads". As Computer Science course enrollments have grown, there has been a necessary increase in the number of undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants (TAs, and UTAs). TA duties often extend far beyond grading, including designing and leading lab or recitation sections, holding office hours and creating assignments. Though advanced students, TAs need proper pedagogical training to be the most effective in their roles. Training strategies have widely varied from no training at all, to semester-long prep courses. We will explore the challenges of TA training across both large and small departments. While much of the effort has focused on teams of undergraduates, most presenters have used the same tools and strategies with their graduate students. Training for TAs should not just include the mechanics of managing a classroom, but culturally relevant pedagogy. The panel will focus on the challenges of providing "just in time", and how we manage both intra-course training and department or campus led courses

Teaching TAs To Teach: Strategies for TA Training

"The only thing that scales with undergrads is undergrads". As Computer Science course enrollments have grown, there has been a necessary increase in the number of undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants (TAs, and UTAs). TA duties often extend far beyond grading, including designing and leading lab or recitation sections, holding office hours and creating assignments. Though advanced students, TAs need proper pedagogical training to be the most effective in their roles. Training strategies have widely varied from no training at all, to semester-long prep courses. We will explore the challenges of TA training across both large and small departments. While much of the effort has focused on teams of undergraduates, most presenters have used the same tools and strategies with their graduate students. Training for TAs should not just include the mechanics of managing a classroom, but culturally relevant pedagogy. The panel will focus on the challenges of providing "just in time", and how we manage both intra-course training and department or campus led courses

Correct Communication in Multi-core Processors.

Computer chips, the most complex artifacts ever made by man, are susceptible to problems with correct functionality due to their intricacy. Incorrect operation of silicon chips has lasting, and sometimes devastating, effects on computer systems and their manufacturers: from incorrect computation results, to security vulnerabilities affecting end users, to financial impact on the vendors. Furthermore, new chips are increasingly fragile, liable to break as the transistors that comprise them become small enough to be measured in atoms. A typical modern computer usually includes a single chip where many processors are connected by a communication medium. This communication medium, a new feature in modern chips, provides many opportunities for catastrophic errors, as it is a complex, unpredictable, unique component. The goal of this dissertation is to provide a new solution to ensure the correct operation of the communication medium in multicore processors, from the early stages of design to the end user. It addresses failures in several modes, and operates across the different phases of the verification process, integrating them into a cohesive framework. A key finding of this work is the synergy among verification phases, connected by a novel abstraction technique and multipurpose hardware and software. Simply put, it ensures that the design operates as intended. This approach to the development cycle accelerates, automates and extends the reach of the verification process, providing decreased occurrence of -- and increased resilience to -- failures. With this solution, the communication system of multi-core chips can operate free from errors.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94084/1/awdeorio_1.pd

Human Computing for EDA

Electronic design automation is a field replete with challenging – and often intractable – problems to be solved over very large instances. Asaresult,thefieldofdesignautomationhas developed a staggering expertise in approximations, abstractions and heuristics as a means toside-step the NP-hardnature of these problems. Approximations andheuristicsareatheartanaturalapplicationofhumanreasoning. Inthisworkweproposetoharnesshumanpotential tosolvesomeoftheseproblems. Specifically,weproposeFunSAT, a massively multi-player puzzle game for SAT solving. FunSAT leverages visual pattern recognition skills, abstract perception and intuitivestrategyskillsofhumans tosolvecomplexSATinstances. Playersaremotivatedbythepuzzle-solvingchallengesofthegame and byits social interactionaspects

Post-silicon verification for cache coherence

Abstract — Modern processor designs are extremely complex and difficult to validate during development, causing a growing portion of the verification effort to shift to post-silicon, after the first few hardware prototypes become available. Extremely slow simulation speeds during pre-silicon verification result in functional errors escaping into silicon, a problem that is further exacerbated by the growing complexity of the memory subsystem in multi-core platforms. In this work we present CoSMa, a novel technology offering high coverage functional post-silicon validation of cache coherence protocols in multicore systems. It enables the detection and diagnosis of functional errors in the memory subsystem by recording at runtime a compact encoding of the operations occurring at each cache line and checking their correctness at regular intervals. We leverage the system’s existing memory resources to store the required activity, thus minimizing area overhead. When the system is finally ready for customer shipment, CoSMa can be completely disabled, eliminating any performance or memory overhead. We reproduce in our experiments a set of coherence protocol bugs based on published errata documents of commercial multicore designs, and show that CoSMa is highly effective in detecting them. I