Introduction

The application that lives in this space is called spoc. Why?

The Explanation

What we are developing here is "a medium-grain reconfigurable hardware design tool and execution simulator for the High Performance Computer Systems (HiPerCopS) research group at Washington State University". It gets tiring to refer to the software this way, so it became apparent early on that a nickname would be needed.

A lot of ideas were kicked around, but there aren't many good acronyms or witty names that can incorporate the general idea of the application. In some ways, the goal of this project is similar to that of SPIM, a MIPS architecture simulator. SPIM is just MIPS backward, and it is short and easy to say. This observation led to the idea of taking the last part of HiPerCopS, CopS, and turning it around to get spoc. It's a stretch for sure, but spoc is short, sweet, and somehow connected to its meaning and purpose. Plus, it has a science fiction connotation, too. :-)