Goals and Syllabus

Course Description

From the course catalog:

CSE 351: The Hardware/Software Interface (4) - Examines key computational abstraction levels below modern high-level languages; number representation, assembly language, introduction to C, memory management, the operating-system process model, high-level machine architecture including the memory hierarchy, and how high-level languages are implemented. Prerequisite: CSE 143.

Course Goals

This course should develop students’ sense of “what really happens” when software runs — and that this question can be answered at several levels of abstraction, including the hardware architecture level, the assembly level, the C programming level, and the Java programming level. The core around which the course is built is C, assembly, and low-level data representation, but this is connected to higher levels (roughly how basic Java could be implemented), lower levels (the general structure of a processor), and the role of the operating system (but not how the operating system is implemented).

For (computer science) students wanting to specialize at higher levels of abstraction, this could in the extreme be the only course they take that considers the “C level” and below. However, most students will take a subset of Systems Programming (CSE333), Operating Systems (CSE451), Compilers (CSE401), Computer Networks (CSE461), etc.

For students interested in hardware, embedded systems, computer engineering, computer architecture, etc., this course is an introductory course along with the hardware courses Digital Design (CSE369) and Digital Circuits (EE371). More advanced courses of particular interest are Software for Embedded Systems (CSE474, formerly CSE466), Computer Architecture I (CSE469), Computer Architecture II CSE470, etc.

Course Themes

• Representation: how different data types (from simple integers to arrays of data structures) are represented in memory, how instructions are encoded, and how memory addresses (pointers) are generated and used to create complex structures
• Translation: how high-level languages are translated into the basic instructions executed by hardware with a particular focus on C and Java
• Control flow: how computers organize the order of their computations, keep track of where they are in large programs, and provide the illusion of multiple processes executing simultaneously

Course Objectives

• describe the multi-step process by which a high-level program becomes a stream of instructions executed by a processor;
• use pointers to manipulate complex data structures;
• write and interpret simple pieces of assembly code (x86-64) and map between high-level languages and assembly;
• describe the basic organization and parameters of memory hierarchy and explain its importance for system performance;
• explain the role of an operating system;
• explain how Java fundamentally differs from C;
• describe what parallelism is and why it is important at the system level; and
• program more effectively (e.g. more efficient at finding bugs, improved intuition about system performance).

Course Syllabus

• Memory and data representation
• Number representation for integers and floats
• Machine code and the C programming language
• x86 assembly language
• Procedures and stacks
• Arrays and other data structures
• Memory and caches
• Operating system process model
• Virtual memory
• Memory allocation
• Implementation of high-level languages (e.g., Java)

Note that even more important than the topics at various levels of abstraction is the connection between them: students should get an informal sense of how Java could be translated to C, C to assembly, and assembly to binary.