Computer Architecture Autumn 2017
CSEP 548
Welcome to Computer Architecture, taught by Prof. Luis Ceze with Liang Luo and Eddie Yan.
This website will be updated throughout the quarter, so check back for the latest.
Course Overview
- Lectures: Wed 6:30p-9:20p in EEB 045
- Office Hours: Wed 5:00p-6:00p @ CSE 5th Floor Landing, or by appointment
- Course mailing list: CSEP548 (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: dropbox
- Slides should be posted sometime before each lecture (ideally). Nag Luis, Liang, or Eddie to upload them if the latest ones aren't up.
- The class discussion board is here and comments can be sent to the instructor or TAs using this anonymous feedback form.
- 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! :)
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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| September 27 (W) | No class. |
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| October 4 (W) | Intro / Metrics / Power, ISA 1
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| October 11 (W) | ISA 2 / Pipelining / Branch Prediction
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| October 18 (W) | Superscalar/Dynamic Scheduling
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| October 25 (W) | Dynamic Scheduling / Multithreading
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| November 1 (W) | Memory Hierarchy / Virtual Memory / NVRAM
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| November 8 (W) | FPGAs (Guest lecture by Andrew Putnam from Microsoft) / GPUs (Guest lecture by Brad Beckmann from AMD) |
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| November 15 (W) | Cache Coherence / Memory Consistency Models
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| November 22 (W) | Memory Consistency Models / Dark Silicon + Specialization / Machine Learning |
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| November 29 (W) | FPGA / Transactional Memory / Warehouse-Scale Computing
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| December 6 (W) | Warehouse-Scale Computing, Dissecting Real Systems, Future technology trends |
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