I’ve recently thought it would be interesting to share some regular updates about LupLab’s activities. Hopefully, I can continue doing this every quarter from now on.

Here is our status at the end of the winter quarter 2023.

  • LupLab received a $50K gift from a private donor to support our research!
  • Noah Krim and Dang Khoi Nguye Ho brought rvcodec.js, our RISC-V instruction encoder/decoder project, to a stable state. We can now convert almost all of the RISC-V instructions, and the UI/UX is visually appealing, clear, and functional. This project will now enter maintenance mode.
  • Tyler Ottman and Noah Krim worked on porting the venerable SPIM MIPS simulator to RISC-V. They developed a first prototype which, while not yet functional, seems to indicate that such a port is doable. Since Tyler has now graduated (congrats!), Noah will take over the project. He is planned to work full time on it over the summer so that we can use it in FQ23 for when I’m scheduled to teach ECS 50, our computer organization and assembly language course.
  • For our current CS study looking at the perception of success and actual success between native students and transfer students, Niharika Misal and I wrote our research protocol for the IRB to soon review. We also designed a student survey, which will be sent to 3rd year students in a few weeks, and we determined which information should be gathered from student records in order to perform our data analysis.
  • #include<cs>, our podcast project that was on standby for a couple of years, now has a new website and we are working on new episodes. I’m hoping a couple will be ready by the end of SQ23.
  • LupIO, our collection of education-friendly I/O devices, is starting to exist in hardware! Eric Liu, Brian Nguyen, and Miles Stamp have implemented a SystemVerilog version of LupIO-RNG, the random number generator, which has real latency and IRQ support.
  • Also on LupIO, I finished implementing a MIPS-based SMP board in QEMU along with the support in the Linux kernel, that only includes LupIO devices and can boot Linux. This is the third of such boards (along with RISC-V and ARM32), therefore supporting the claim that LupIO is the first and only existing processor-agnostic collection of I/O devices! A paper publication will be the next step.