Advanced Computer Architecture

 

Instructor: Jim Plusquellic

Office hours: Tue/Thurs 6:45 - 8:00 PM (212 ECS)

TA: Ying Ouyang

TA office hours: TBD

 

Prerequisite: CMSC 411 or equivalent

 

Text: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, by Hennessy and Patterson.

 

• Measuring Performance & Cost

Performance measurement

Benchmarks

 

• Costs of building computers

Price/performance

Instruction Sets

Classifying instruction sets

Interactions between languages and instruction sets

Measuring instruction set usage

Instruction set examples

 

• Improving CPU Performance: Pipelining

Basic pipelining

Data & control hazards

Dynamic instruction scheduling

Branch prediction

Instruction-level parallelism

 

• Vector Processors

Vector architecture & design

Vector performance

 

• Memory Hierarchies

Evaluating memory hierarchy performance

Cache design & optimization

Virtual memory design

Memory protection

Memory coherency

 

• Storage Systems

Types and uses of storage devices

Interfacing I/O to the rest of the system

Reliability and availability

I/O system design

 

• Multiprocessors

Classifying parallel architectures

Centralized vs. distributed shared memory

Interconnection topologies

Synchronization

Memory consistency