Group 0xf1d0
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Our work got off to a good start, when around mid-semester we came across a
static buffer holding information from the previous frame. This meant that we
could not split frames arbitrarily among processors, as we had aimed to do; we
had the same fundamental problem with the architecture that we earlier feared
but judged not to be an issue. Interestingly, due to the lack of mention of
this issue in documentation and the obscurity of the code implementing it, it
seems that we could not have found this limitation except by finding it the
hard way, which is what we did. Realizing that our architecture was not
workable as originally conceived, we came up with several options, most
notably splitting up MP3s differently; however, these options would have
rendered our architecture neither modular nor adaptable nor particularly
interesting. Instead, we chose to revert to an architecture which we earlier
rejected, namely the coarse-grained parallelism model. We chose this
architecture because it best exemplified our original design goal of
modularity, used some of the earlier work we had done on communications, and
did not make it necessary to change the physical layout of the board.
This change, despite efforts to reuse as much as possible, was a significant
setback, particularly for software: Basically all the work Rod had done on
software needed to be scrapped; Eric's and Jim's work also needed substantial
changes. In many ways, this unforeseen tiny bit of code caused us to entirely
lose half a semester's work. Indeed, it was the MP3 decoding software, the
area in which the most work was lost, that was the main thing keeping us from
completing the project in time. Given the amount of time we were set back, and
the amount of time other groups needed to finish after getting as far as we
did, we feel that we would most likely would have finished, were it not for
our unfortunate choice of architecture.
For the final results