Computer Architecture Autumn 2015
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Welcome to Computer Architecture, taught by Prof. Luis Ceze with Vincent Lee and Mark Wyse.
This website will be updated throughout the quarter, so check back for the latest.
Course Overview
- Lectures: Thursday 6:30-9:20PM in EEB 045
- Course mailing list (everyone in the class including staff).
- Course staff mailing list (Luis, Mark and Vincent only)
- 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, Vincent, or Mark to upload them if the latest ones aren't up.
- Grading: Reading commentary assignments account for 25% of the final grade, and homeworks account for 75%. All same weight.
- Late day policy: You have 5 late days, where weekends counts as 1 late day. Past that, each day costs 10% of the assignment’s grade, a bargain! :)
- Comments can be sent to the instructor or TAs using this anonymous feedback form
- Catalyst Discussion Board: GoPost discussion board
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 readings, including some textbook chapters and influential research papers. Some readings will be marked (required), while the rest are suggested, but highly recommended. In addition, a few of the research papers will require an additional commentary as a homework assignment (bolded). The commentary should be a paragraph describing what you found most interesting or surprising, or asking questions that you have. These commentaries should be submitted to the Catalyst dropbox by the due date given on Catalyst.
(subject to change -- do not start a homework before the assigned date)
| Date | Topic & Readings | Homework Assignments |
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| October 1st (Thursday) | Introduction / Metrics / Performance / Power / Energy / The ISA
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| October 8th (Thursday) | ISA Part 2 / Pipelining Review / Branch Prediction
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| October 15th (Thursday) | Superscalar / Dynamic Scheduling / Multithreading |
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| October 22nd (Thursday) | Memory Hierarchy / Caches / Virtual Memory / Non-volatile RAM
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| October 29th (Thursday) | Clusters/ Software Distributed Shared Memory / FPGA |
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| November 5th (Thursday) | Cache Coherence
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| November 9th (Monday) | Homework 4 Due |
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| November 12th (Thursday) | Memory Consistency Models / Transactional Memory
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| November 19th (Thursday) Guest Lectures (normal class time) | GPUs by Brad Beckman (AMD) / 3D Stacking by Gabe Loh (AMD)
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| November 26th (Thursday) | THANKSGIVING (NO CLASS)
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| December 2nd (Wednesday) | Homework 5 Due |
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| December 3rd (Thursday) | Optional Office Hours - 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM |
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| December 6th (Sunday) | Homework 6 Due (Extra Credit) - NO LATE DAYS ALLOWED |
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| December 10th (Thursday) | Warehouse-Scale Computing / Dennard Scaling / Dark Silicon / Specialization / XBox One / Wrap Up / Conclusion |
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Reading suggestions mentioned in class in passing
Architecture Support for Disciplined Approximate Programming
HardBound: Architectural Support for Spatial Safety of the C Programming Language