Where and When
Instructor:
Larry Snyder, 584 Allen Center, 543-9265, snyder@cs
Office hours: M 3:30-4:00 and 5:00-5:30 or by appointment (contact Judy Watson, jwatson@cs)
Teaching Assistants:
Scott Schremmer scotths@cs
Offices hours Tues. 2-3, Wed. 12:30-1:20 cse 220 or by appointment
Adrienne Wang axwang@cs
Offices hours Thur 1:30-3:30 Allen Center 220 or by appointment
Course Goals
From the programmer's point of view, "the hardware" is given by its
architectural specification, or Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). We will
look at the general topic of computer architecture, that includes the
organization and the performance of various parts of a computer system, using
the MIPS R2000 as a specific example.
Text
D.Patterson and J.Hennessy Computer Organization & Design: The Hardware/Software
Interface 3rd Edition, 2005
Homework
The assignments will include assembly language programming assignments using
SPIM (a MIPS assembly language simulator), simulations of components of the
machine (pipeline, caches) using the C programming language, and problem sets
from the book. There will be assignments every week (well almost every week).
You can discuss the assignments with each other but you should do the actual
work by yourselves unless we ask you to do them in teams.
Please hand in your assignments on the due date in class. Late assignments will either not be accepted or severely penalized unless you talked about it to the instructor beforehand.
Grading
There will be one midterm OCTOBER 28 and one final, Tuesday, DECEMBER 13, 2005,
230-420P
Homework 40%; midterm 20%; final 40%. These percentages are approximate.
Intangibles may arise. Class participation is a bonus. (Class participation is
strongly encouraged. Don't be afraid to ask questions: dumb questions do not
exist. If I ask you a question and you don't know, just say so. That's no
problem. I will certainly answer some of your questions also by "I don't
know!".)
E-mail and WWW
We will have a class mailing list and we will communicate often through e-mail.
Feel free to send Scott, Adrienne, or me questions. We will forward questions
and answers to the whole class if appropriate. Check the WWW CSE378 home page
often.