Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
This paper details the specification and implementation of a single-machine blockchain simulator. It also includes a brief introduction on the history & underlying concepts of blockchain, with explanations on features such as decentralization, openness, trustlessness, and consensus. The introduction features a brief overview of public interest and current implementations of…
This paper details the specification and implementation of a single-machine blockchain simulator. It also includes a brief introduction on the history & underlying concepts of blockchain, with explanations on features such as decentralization, openness, trustlessness, and consensus. The introduction features a brief overview of public interest and current implementations of blockchain before stating potential use cases for blockchain simulation software. The paper then gives a brief literature review of blockchain's role, both as a disruptive technology and a foundational technology. The literature review also addresses the potential and difficulties regarding the use of blockchain in Internet of Things (IoT) networks, and also describes the limitations of blockchain in general regarding computational intensity, storage capacity, and network architecture. Next, the paper gives the specification for a generic blockchain structure, with summaries on the behaviors and purposes of transactions, blocks, nodes, miners, public & private key cryptography, signature validation, and hashing. Finally, the author gives an overview of their specific implementation of the blockchain using C/C++ and OpenSSL. The overview includes a brief description of all the classes and data structures involved in the implementation, including their function and behavior. While the implementation meets the requirements set forward in the specification, the results are more qualitative and intuitive, as time constraints did not allow for quantitative measurements of the network simulation. The paper concludes by discussing potential applications for the simulator, and the possibility for future hardware implementations of blockchain.
Low-level optimization is the process of handwriting key parts of applications in assembly code that is better than what can be generated from a higher-level language. In performance-intensive applications, this is key to ensuring efficient code. This is generally something that is taught in on the job training, but knowledge…
Low-level optimization is the process of handwriting key parts of applications in assembly code that is better than what can be generated from a higher-level language. In performance-intensive applications, this is key to ensuring efficient code. This is generally something that is taught in on the job training, but knowledge of it improves college student’s skill sets and makes them more desirable employees
I have created material for a course teaching this low-level optimization with assembly code. I specifically focus on the x86 architecture, as this is one of the most prolific computer architectures. The course contains a series of lecture videos, live coding videos, and structured programming assignments to support the learning objectives. This material is presented in an entirely autonomous way, which serves as remote learning material and can be easily added as supplemental material to an existing course.
