CS441 System Architecture

Course Description

Computer design fundamentals, performance and cost, pipelining, instruction-level parallelism, memory hierarchy design, storage systems, and vector processing.

Tentative Schedule

1. Thu, Sep 04

   First day of instruction; late registration begins

2. Thu, Sep 04

   Physics: Power in, Heat out, and voltage scaling

3. Tue, Sep 09

   Semiconductors: triumph of the MOSFET

4. Thu, Sep 11

   Building a simple CPU from logic gates

5. Tue, Sep 16

   Embedded: microcontrollers and instruction encoding

6. Thu, Sep 18

   Hardware parallelism: serial software, FPGA, or ASIC?

7. Fri, Sep 19

   Deadline for student- and faculty-initiated drops (course does not appear on academic record)

8. Tue, Sep 23

   Pipelining

9. Thu, Sep 25

   Superscalar

10. Tue, Sep 30

    Multicore, SMP, and SMT

11. Thu, Oct 02

    Caches and cache coherence

12. Tue, Oct 07

    Locks, deadlock, and atomics

13. Thu, Oct 09

    Histogramming: multicore performance analysis

14. Tue, Oct 14

    SIMD: Single Instruction, Multiple Data

15. Thu, Oct 16

    SSE & AVX intrinsics

16. Tue, Oct 21

    Review for midterm

17. Thu, Oct 23

    Midterm exam

18. Tue, Oct 28

    Project 1 presentations

19. Thu, Oct 30

    Project 1 presentations cont'd

20. Fri, Oct 31

    Deadline for student- and faculty-initiated withdrawals (W grade appears on academic record)

21. Tue, Nov 04

    Network sockets and protocol design

22. Thu, Nov 06

    Network performance: HTTP, TCP, or UDP?

23. Tue, Nov 11

    MPI: network communication for clusters

24. Thu, Nov 13

    Heat flow: 2D stencil application

25. Tue, Nov 18

    CUDA: graphics hardware programming

26. Thu, Nov 20

    CUDA __shared__ memory and workgroup size

27. Tue, Nov 25

    GPU performance modeling and tuning

28. Thu, Nov 27

    Thanksgiving holiday (no classes, most offices closed)

29. Tue, Dec 02

    Topic by popular demand!

30. Thu, Dec 04

    Topic by popular demand, cont'd!

31. Tue, Dec 09

    Project 2 presentations

32. Thu, Dec 11

    Project 2 presentations, cont'd

33. Fri, Dec 12

    Last day of instruction

34. Thu, Dec 18

    Final exam 8-10am

Grading Policies

Grades will be assigned based on the following percentage intervals:

A+

[99%, 100%)

A

[93%, 99%)

A-

[90%, 93%)

B+

[87%, 90%)

B

[83%, 87%)

B-

[80%, 83%)

C+

[77%, 80%)

C

[73%, 77%)

C-

[70%, 73%)

D+

[67%, 70%)

D

[63%, 67%)

D-

[60%, 63%)

F

[0%, 60%)

Policies

Students are expected to be at every class meeting on time, and are responsible for all class content, whether present or not. If absence from class is necessary, in-class work (other than quizzes) and homework may be made up only if the instructor is notified as soon as possible; in particular, absences due to scheduled events must be arranged ahead of time. Academic dishonesty will not be tolerated, and will be dealt with according to UAF procedures. Students in this class must pay the CS lab fee.

UAF academic policies http://www.uaf.edu/catalog/current/academics

CS Department policies http://www.cs.uaf.edu/departmental-policies/

Disabilities Services:

The UAF Office of Disability Services implements the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and ensures that UAF students have equal access to the campus and course materials. I will work with the UAF Office of Disability Services (208 WHITAKER BLDG, 474-5655) to provide reasonable accommodation to students with disabilities.