CSE 410: Computer Systems

Structure and components of hardware and software systems. Machine organization, including central processor and input-output architectures; assembly language programming; operating systems, including process, storage, and file management. Intended for non-majors. No credit to students who have completed CSE 351, CSE 378, or CSE 451.

The goal of the course is to develop a sense of "what is really happening" when software runs -- and that this can be answered at several levels of abstraction including hardware architecture, machine instructions, assembly language, the memory hierarchy (including caches and virtual memory), operating systems, and higher-level languages like C and Java. The core around which the course is built is C, assembly, and low-level data representations, but this is connected to other levels as well as to the role of the operating system in providing abstractions used to support programs. The goal is to understand how these abstractions interact from the programmer's perspective and how they affect program execution.

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Number representation: Two’s complement, signed vs. unsigned, floating point (1 week)
Assembly (2 weeks)
- Memory vs. registers
- Instruction format
- Control structures in assembly (loops, procedure calls)
C (2 weeks)
- Pointers, arrays, strings
- Memory management, malloc/free, stack vs. heap
- structs
Compilation, linking, libraries (code across multiple files) (0.5 weeks)
The process model (what the operating system provides, not how it provides it) (1 week)
- Virtualization and isolation (including virtual memory)
- Components of a process state and notion of a context switch
- System calls for accessing shared resources and communication channels
- Asynchronous signals
High-level machine architecture (2 weeks)
- Register file
- Instruction cycle
- Caching and the memory hierarchy
Operating system overview (1 week)
- Abstraction layers
- Processes, threads, scheduling core OS data structures
- File systems