On Tue, May 5, 2020 at 2:36 AM Yale N. Patt <patt@ece.utexas.edu> wrote:
My students,

A number of you have reached out to Aniket and me with questions as we head 
into the end of the semester, so I thought I would put it all in one email 
for all of you. If there is something I have not covered in this email, 
of course you should let one of us know.

First, I hope you are all staying safe. As important as everything else 
is, getting through this nightmare with no permanent scars is number 1 
in importance. Everything else is correctable later on.

The checkout process is as follows:

1. Once you are sure you are ready, let us know when you would like to 
schedule checkout. If you feel a meeting with Aniket and me should come
first, let us know and the five us will meet over zoom. For some of you 
that might not be a bad idea since we can look at where you are and suggest 
eliminating some of the elements of your project. Of course it would not be 
as good as getting everything working, but it would be enormously better than 
having nothing working.

As I said earlier, if a group has not contacted us with a checkout date
by this coming Friday evening, Aniket and I will schedule a meeting with that
group on Saturday or Sunday.

I have written a very, very small program that I have asked Aniket to put 
on the webpage. It tests three very important elements of your design. 
If that program does not execute correctly on your Simulator, you are not
ready for checkout.

2. Checkout must begin at the latest on March 15. I can not make it any
later than that and still get grades turned in my the deadline. Checkout
is as follows:

Before you start checkout, you will send us the Simulator. This can be as 
late as 30 minutes before scheduled check out. If you have had to fall back 
and leave any module in behavioral level verilog, you will let us know at 
that time what modules are behavioral.

Aniket (or one of my other PhD students, depending on the timing) will give
you the test programs that test the various items that your implementation
has to deal with: cache, memory, pipeline flow, dependency stalls, exceptions, 
etc. You will run each program, and we will note the results. If your 
Simulator fails to execute the program and you wish to try to fix the problem, 
we will let you. Sometimes this can take several hours, and I am okay with 
that. When you are done with a test program, you will move on to the next 
test program.

Check out on the set of test programs is finished when we have adequate data 
as to which programs executed correctly and which did not. I am happy to have 
you fix small bugs, but of course there is no time to do a major redesign.

Once that part of the checkout is completed, the team will meet with me and
Aniket to look at your design, ask you questions, and give you a chance to 
brag about things in your design that you are most proud of.

The final step in the project is the final report, which I had wanted you to 
turn in by May 15, the date normally set aside for a final exam. I can extend 
that deadline to May 18 and still have time to read it and turn in grades.

Some of you have asked if there will be any penalty if you don't get checked
out until May 15. The answer is no. Your grade will be independent of when
you get checked out. I am interested in you successfully completing the
project and if you need all next week to do it, and are willing to do it,
I am not going to penalize you for doing the best job you can. 

Any further questions, please do not hesitate to ask us.

Good luck.

Stay safe.
Yale Patt