After landing in the Chicago midway airport on June 4th, I took the train to Evanston. Due to a miscommunication with my landlord, the apartment I would be staying would not be ready for me to move into until the end of the day. This gave me an opportunity to explore Northwestern’s campus. The first place I visited was Dr. Joseph’s office, so I would know where to be the next morning. Leaving the tech building, I was confronted with a stunning view of Lake Michigan, and a beach crowded with students. After exploring Evanston for a few hours, I could finally move into the apartment.
The next day, I woke up at 8, ate breakfast, and headed over to the Tech building. This was the first time I met Dr. Joseph in person, he brought me into his office and we began discussing the project. The main purpose of the project is to test and benchmark a floating point unit, and see where errors occur. Instead of building a FPU from scratch, we utilized an OpenCores project as a framework to save time. Before any testing could be done, I needed to create a way to easily test the hardware, and before that, I needed to fully understand how the hardware worked. I spent the rest of the week going the the source, and taking note on the entire calculation process.