Need ideas for FYP

I am student of Bachelors and going to start my FYP in some days. I am going into the field of high computation in verilog. These are some projects which I might be doing:
1.the n-body gravitational problem
2.Oceanic modeling
3.Cancer biology modeling

Any other projects you might suggest that may be beneficial for me.
And also my main aim after Bachelors is to get admission in some US university. 
Thanks!

And also, I have spartan 6 xc6slx45 kit available in college Lab.

Hi,

>> verilog. 

>> These are some projects which I might be doing:
>> spartan 6 xc6slx45 kit 

>>1.the n-body gravitational problem
>>2.Oceanic modeling
>>3.Cancer biology modeling

this is not to discourage you. But please be warned that heavy-duty FPGA
implementations as youre planning are

*much*

and I mean "much" harder than it looks from all those shiny webpages that
make it look like Lego bricks because they want to sell you stuff.

Here's my proposal: Why don't you implement "Hello world!" in Morse code.
Which is ".... . .-.. .-.. ---   .-- --- .-. .-.. -.. " 
Just a blinking LED. 
Expect that i'll take between a day and two weeks. This includes things
that "should" be easy but are not, such as installing ISE 14.7 when you've
never done it before, making the JTAG interface work etc.

In my personal opinion, the xc6slx45 is an excellent choice to get started.
Because
a) it does not require a Xilinx license to program it
b) I can get one cheaply if you ever need one, i.e. "Numato Saturn" or
"Pipistrello" boards, for ~$130..160. 
c) If it breaks, it's no big deal, compared to a $3000+ board.
To learn Verilog, the smallest and cheapest FPGA will do, if you decide to
buy one for yourself. The typical feedback from the board is "this doesn't
work - go simulate some more".

Note, you said "Verilog", not using some intermediate wizardry that
generates the code. For the latter, a sxl45 is probably too small
(guessing, haven't done it myself).	   
					
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>> b) I can get one cheaply if you ever need one
heh that was supposed to read "-you- can get one cheaply". I don't run a
shop :-)	   
					
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awaish2011@namal.edu.pk wrote:

> I am student of Bachelors and going to start my FYP in some days. 
> I am going into the field of high computation in verilog. 

There has been work for years on doing computationally intensive
problems in FPGAs, much of it hasn't worked out very well. 

One problem is that it is hard to do economically. That is, such
that someone will buy the product. 

> These are some projects which I might be doing:

> 1.the n-body gravitational problem
> 2.Oceanic modeling
> 3.Cancer biology modeling

I was once thinking about doing a biology related problem, and
decided that I could do it with 2000 of the largest S3 FPGAs.
That was still a little too big at the time. 

There are some interesting projects out there, but you have to
compete with the non-FPGA based solutions, and the fact that the
actual solution might not be needed.

For example, the n-body problem might be useful to those at
NASA trying to get rockets to far away planets. But being able
to do 0.1% or 1% better (in fuel use or arrival time) isn't worth
all that much.  You have to be able to do a lot better to make
it worth spending money on.
 
> Any other projects you might suggest that may be beneficial for me.
> And also my main aim after Bachelors is to get admission in some 
> US university. 

Planning ahead is useful. The projects you mention will take teams
of researchers years to work on. (You have to include packaging
and software and user manuals, so that ordinary people can use them.)

For a more reasonably sized project, implement a character based
computer terminal.  That is, a keyboard, display, and serial port.
(Note that many FPGA boards have the hardware to do this.)

In years long past, it wasn't an unusual undergraduate project 
built out of a microprocessor and TTL parts.  Now, it should
be a reasonable sized FPGA project.

You can separately work on the keyboard input, UART (find one
on opencores, but you still have to figure out how to use it),
and character based raster display.  You have to get the timing
right for an available video monitor.

-- glen

maybe this still, before someone quotes me later:
When I say the FPGA you mentioned is an "excellent choice", I meant for
_learning_, as you can use it on your own PC without $2999 license. Not for
high performance computing.
Spartan 6 is marketed with "delivers an optimal balance of low risk, low
cost, and low power for cost-sensitive applications". 	   
					
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On 10/13/2014 12:09 PM, awaish2011@namal.edu.pk wrote:
> I am student of Bachelors and going to start my FYP in some days. I am going into the field of high computation in verilog. These are some projects which I might be doing:
> 1.the n-body gravitational problem
> 2.Oceanic modeling
> 3.Cancer biology modeling
>
> Any other projects you might suggest that may be beneficial for me.
> And also my main aim after Bachelors is to get admission in some US university.
> Thanks!

How about something a little more practical?  I expect there is not much 
room for improvement for solving gravitational problems much faster or 
more accurately.  Is there really a need?

Oceanic modeling is a huge area.  You might want to narrow the focus on 
that one a *lot* more before you try to narrow your list... or just 
remove it.

Cancer biology modeling is also a *huge* area.  I do recall some years 
ago there was a small project at NIH (if I remember correctly) who was 
working on a real time interactive model of complex molecules.  They 
would model the forces of a molecule and let the researcher use a pair 
of many degrees of freedom controls to bend and twist the molecule while 
getting haptic feedback.  I'm not sure what happened to this project as 
I haven't seen anywhere that it became a widely useful tool. 
Interesting though.

An area I find interesting is low power processing.  You might consider 
what it takes to do something with a minimum of power consumption using 
off the shelf devices.  There are a lot of potential applications there.

-- 

Rick

rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:
> Oceanic modeling is a huge area.  You might want to narrow the focus on 
> that one a *lot* more before you try to narrow your list... or just 
> remove it.

The trouble with all these projects is they're something a GPU could do with
much less programming effort (at least to make it work non-optimally).  So
I'm not sure the advantage of using an FPGA.  In an FPGA it's a lot harder
to change the architecture if the problem changes (at least if you're
writing in Verilog/VHDL it is).

> An area I find interesting is low power processing.  You might consider 
> what it takes to do something with a minimum of power consumption using 
> off the shelf devices.  There are a lot of potential applications there.

One thing FPGAs are good at I/O.  So a nice example is video processing -
you take in video from a camera, do something clever to it, and output to a
display.  There's a lot of data so you have to process it fast, and it's a
nice visual demo.  It's also easy to debug - you can see what's going wrong
on the screen.

Likewise other kinds of non-optical data (eg scan data from a 2D sensor of
some kind).  You can also use audio or other sensors, as long as you have a
useful output.

Theo

Theo Markettos <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

(previously snipped project suggestions)

> The trouble with all these projects is they're something a GPU could do with
> much less programming effort (at least to make it work non-optimally).  So
> I'm not sure the advantage of using an FPGA.  In an FPGA it's a lot harder
> to change the architecture if the problem changes (at least if you're
> writing in Verilog/VHDL it is).

If you can do them in fixed point, you can make really big arrays
to process really big data sets, though not so cheap.

There are people who need that, but not so many of them.

Learning how to do it isn't bad, though.

(snip)

> One thing FPGAs are good at I/O.  So a nice example is video processing -
> you take in video from a camera, do something clever to it, and output to a
> display.  There's a lot of data so you have to process it fast, and it's a
> nice visual demo.  It's also easy to debug - you can see what's going wrong
> on the screen.

Well, many filtering algorithms can be implemented as systolic arrays,
which allow for minimal I/O for the processing done. 

Implementing an FIR filter in fixed point in an FPGA would be a
reasonable sized project.  Again, learn about systolic arrays.
 
> Likewise other kinds of non-optical data (eg scan data from a 2D sensor of
> some kind).  You can also use audio or other sensors, as long as you have a
> useful output.

-- glen

On 10/14/2014 8:17 PM, Theo Markettos wrote:
> rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Oceanic modeling is a huge area.  You might want to narrow the focus on
>> that one a *lot* more before you try to narrow your list... or just
>> remove it.
>
> The trouble with all these projects is they're something a GPU could do with
> much less programming effort (at least to make it work non-optimally).  So
> I'm not sure the advantage of using an FPGA.  In an FPGA it's a lot harder
> to change the architecture if the problem changes (at least if you're
> writing in Verilog/VHDL it is).

Why is an HDL harder to change than any other code?  I use the same 
editor for both...


>> An area I find interesting is low power processing.  You might consider
>> what it takes to do something with a minimum of power consumption using
>> off the shelf devices.  There are a lot of potential applications there.
>
> One thing FPGAs are good at I/O.  So a nice example is video processing -
> you take in video from a camera, do something clever to it, and output to a
> display.  There's a lot of data so you have to process it fast, and it's a
> nice visual demo.  It's also easy to debug - you can see what's going wrong
> on the screen.

That is very true.


> Likewise other kinds of non-optical data (eg scan data from a 2D sensor of
> some kind).  You can also use audio or other sensors, as long as you have a
> useful output.

I/O is a big plus for an FPGA.  But I think the OP wants something that 
deals with some current major problem.

I wonder what medical app might be suitable for an FPGA.  Something that 
uses an array of sensors to measure body contour or pressure maybe, like 
a footstep?

-- 

Rick