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Course Objective:

Logical design of digital computer systems. Examines the functional basis of various computer structures including control systems, memory devices, work structure and addressing, arithmetic and logic units, and input/output devices. Recent advances in computer architecture. Research project and presentation on advanced topics required of graduate students.

• Introduction to Computer Architecture: task of a computer designer, technology/cost trend, measuring and reporting performance, Amdahl's law, concept of memory hierarchy.
• Computer arithmetic: integer adder, integer multiplier, divisor, floating point representation, exceptions, floating point add/multiply, Speeding up integer multiplication/division.
• Memory hierarchy: ABC of caches, reducing cache misses, reducing cache miss penalty, main memory, interleaved memory, independent memory banks, virtual memory, TLB, Alpha AXP memory management, crosscutting issues in memory hierarchy design, cache coherency.
• I/O: storage systems, buses, I/O performance measures, RAID, interfacing to an OS, designing an I/O system.
• Instruction Set Architecture: classification, memory addressing, compilers and instruction set architecture, DLX architecture.
• Pipelining: Basic pipeline for DLX, pipeline data hazards, loads & control hazards, Interrupts, multiple cycle operations, MIPS R4000 case study.
• Advanced Pipeline: overcoming data hazards with dynamic scheduling, dynamic hardware prediction for reducing branch penalty, instruction level parallelism (ILP), Power PC 620 case study.
• Network: interconnection networks, network media, switch topology, commercial Interconnection networks, ATM network case study.
• Parallel architecture: taxonomy, share memory architecture, coherence protocols, vector processing.

CS520 S99 Class Photo Album.
To help create the class photo album:

• Please scan your recent photo in JPEG file format as <your login>.jpg file.
• Create a personal web page with reference to the photo as <your login>.html
• Put these two files in your public_html directory at owl.uccs.edu.
• Send me an email when you have done this.

Note that your login on owl.uccs.edu will be the first and middle initial concatenated with the first six characters of your last name.  If you do not have accessed to a scanner, please bring the photo in our next class time and I will scan it for you, then return it to you.

Midterm & Final (each 20%), homework assignments(40%), one project (20%).

Grade Query Web Page

Project web page with lists of potential projects.

Text:

John Hennessy & David A. Patterson, "Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach," Morgan Kaufmann Publisher Inc., 1996, 2nd
Edition.

Reading assignments will not cover exactly the same material as the lectures.

• Computer Architecture Video Series
• Related resources of Hennesy and Patterson's book
• IEEE FP display program source code
• Source code demonstrate NaN situation
• EDO FAQ