Computer Architecture Autumn 2014
548
Welcome to Computer Architecture, taught by Prof. Luis Ceze with Brandon Holt.
This website will be updated throughout the quarter, so check back for the latest.
Course Overview
- Lectures: Wed/Fri 9:30-10:50 in EEB 045
- Course mailing list: CSE548 (if you join late, you can check the archives to get caught up)
- Textbook: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (5th Edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 2012), by John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson
- Assignment submissions: Catalyst dropbox
- Slides should be posted sometime before each lecture (ideally). Nag Luis or Brandon to upload them if the latest ones aren't up.
- Comments can be sent to the instructor or TAs using this anonymous feedback form
Schedule
This is the planned lecture schedule. It will get filled in as we go, so please check back.
Each week there will be several suggested readings, including some textbook chapters and influential research papers. Some lectures there will be a required reading (bolded), which you will need to submit a commentary on. This should be just a paragraph describing what you found most interesting, surprising, or asking questions that you have. These commentaries should be submitted to the Catalyst dropbox before the following lecture.
(subject to change)
| Date | Topic & Readings | HW |
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| Sept 24 (W) | Intro / Metrics / Project ideas
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| Sep 26 (F) | The ISA
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| Oct 1 (W) | ISA/Pipelining Review
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| Oct 3 (F) | Branch prediction
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| Oct 8 (W) | Superscalar / Dynamic Scheduling |
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| Oct 10 (F) | Dynamic Scheduling/Short Project Pitches
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| Oct 15 (W) | Multithreading/Memory Hierarchy
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| Oct 17 (F) | Memory hierarchy |
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| Oct 22 (W) | Virtual Memory/NVRAM/Cache coherence
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| Oct 24 (F) | No lecture (Luis gone, Brandon @ OOPSLA). |
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| Oct 29 (W) | Cache Coherence/Memory Consistency models
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| Oct 31 (F) | Doug Carmean on Larrabee |
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| Nov 5 (W) | Memory Consistency models |
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| Nov 7 (F) | Brad Beckman on GPUs |
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| Nov 10 (M) |
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| Nov 12 (W) | No class (Luis out of town) |
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| Nov 14 (F) | Gabe Loh on 3D Stacking |
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| Nov 19 (W) | Transactional Memory/Warehouse-scale Computing
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| Nov 21 (F) | No class (Luis out of town) |
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| Nov 26 (W) | Denard Scaling/Dark Silicon/specialization |
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| Nov 28 (F) | UW Holiday (Thanksgiving) |
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| Dec 3 (W) | XBox-One/wrap-up/discussions |
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| Dec 5 (F) | Visit to the Living Computer Museum |
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| Dec 8 (M) | no class |
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Calendar
This calendar just has the lectures, office hours, and special activities/meetings to help you keep up. We'll always let you know about changes via email, but feel free to subscribe to this if you like.
Reading suggestions mentioned in class in passing
Architecture Support for Disciplined Approximate Programming
HardBound: Architectural Support for Spatial Safety of the C Programming Language