CS382M: Advanced Computer Architecture

Final class project reports are now available here. Enjoy.

This course focuses on the techniques of quantitative analysis and evaluation of modern computing systems, such as the selection of appropriate benchmarks to reveal and compare the performance of alternative design choices in system design. The emphasis is on the major component subsystems of high performance computers: pipelining, instruction level parallelism, memory hierarchies, input/output, and network-oriented interconnections. Students will undertake a major computing system analysis and design project.

Administrative Information

Course Schedule

Week Date Topic Lecture Reading Due
1 Jan 18 Intro, Admin, Review: Perf/Cost, Amdahl's Law, Tech Trends 1 2 (and slides for lec 2 Ch 1,2
2 Jan 25 Caching and Memory, ISAs, Pipelining, Hazards and Branch Prediction 3slides 4 5 Ch 3 W: Project interests F: HW 1
3 Feb 1 Pipelining, Hazards, and Static Branch Prediction 6 7a 7b 8a 8b Ch 4 F: Project Topic
4 Feb 8 ILP: Scoreboarding, Tomasulu, Speculation 9a 9b 10 11 11b F: HW2 part 1
5 Feb 15 ILP: Dynamic Prediction, Limits of ILP, Vector Processors 12 13 papers F: HW2 part 2 F: discussions -- advanced ILP
6 Feb 22 Memory Hierarchy 14 15 16 Ch 5 W: Guest Lecture Dr. Burger
F: Project Proposal
7 Mar 1 Memory DRAM, VM, and Banks 17 18 papers F: discussions -- advanced Memory
8 Mar 8 Memory and Review M: HW3 W: Midterm 1 

6-9pm ART 1.110
M: Suzan eggars talk 3:30-4:30 Mar 15 Spring Break M-F: Spring Break
9 Mar 22 I/O: Metrics, Queuing, Busses, Disks, RAID 22 23 24 26 Ch 6
10 Mar 29 I/O: Tertiary, Networks 25 27 papers F: HW4 discussions -- advanced I/O
11 Apr 5 Networks 28 pdf 29 pdf Ch 7 F: Project Checkpoint
12 Apr 12 Networks, Parallel Architectures 30 pdf W: Guest Lecture Dr. Keckler
13 Apr 19 MPPs 31 pdf 32 pdf 33 pdf 34 pdf Ch 8 Fri: HW5
14 Apr 26 MPPs, Review 36 pdf 37 pdf W: Midterm 2 

6-9pm RLM 7.124 F: discussions --parallel

15 May 4 Project Presentations M/W/F: Project Presentations 

schedule Fri: Last Day of Classes
M: Written Project Report

Project

Project Guidelines

Project presentation guidelines.
Important deadlines

Here is a program to trace system calls that some of you may want for the project.

Additional Resources