ECS 250A ADVANCED COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE (4) I

Lecture: 3 hours

Termpaper: 1 hour

Prerequisite: Course 154B or EEC 170; course 150 or 151A

Grading: Letter; based on two examinations (33% each) and a research project(33%)

Catalog Description:

Introduction to modern research topics and methods in computer architecture. Design implications of memory latency and bandwidth limitations. Performance enhancement via within-processor and between-processor parallelism. Term project involving student-proposed extensions/modifications of work in the research literature.

Goals:

To provide the student with an overview of the current state of modern computer architecture, and to prepare the student for the rest of the advanced computer architecture sequence.

Expanded Course Description:

I. Processor Complexity Modes

A. Overview of the historical trend toward richer instruction sets, more complex addressing modes and a greater number of special-purpose registers
B. Motivations for the modern trend towards simpler architectures
C. Relations to operating systems and programming languages

II. Calibration of Storage and Processor Speeds

A. Discrepancies between memory speed and processor speed
B. Congestion on processor-memory links
C. Introduction to multiple cache systems, interleaving methods and multistage networks

III. Opportunities for Parallelism

A. Fine- and coarse-grained parallelism
B. Introduction to pipelining
C. Introduction to tightly- and loosely-coupled designs
D. Sources of sublinear speed-up problems, and various approaches to ameliorating these problems

Textbook:

Primarily research papers from journals and conferences.

Instructor: N. Matloff

Prepared By: N. Matloff (Feb. 1997)

THIS COURSE DOES NOT DUPLICATE ANY EXISTING COURSE.

Revised: 2/97