Tentative Syllabus (part 1 of 3)
Fall Semester, 2021
Classroom: Classroom South 411
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Time: MW 5:30 p.m. - 7:15 p.m.
Instructor: Dr. Michael Weeks
Computer Science Department
Office:
office hours will be conducted via Webex.
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 2:30-4:30 p.m., starting August 31, ending November 30
web-page: http://hallertau.cs.gsu.edu/~mweeks
Teaching Assistant: Yihan Zhong
TA's office hours: TBA
TA's office: office hours will be held via Webex
TA's e-mail address: yzhong3 [at] student [dot] gsu [dot] edu
Click here for the Syllabus policies
FINAL EXAM
The Final Exam will be presentations, including
December 8, 2021, from 16:15 to 18:45
(the official final exam time).
TEXTS
- Selected research papers.
-
We will discuss transistors and logic devices.
The first chapter of this book should be helpful, if you want more information:
Neil H. E. Weste and David Harris,
CMOS VLSI Design: A Circuits and Systems Perspective,
third edition, Addison Wesley, 2005.
- We will have a review that includes M. Morris Mano, Computer System Architecture 3rd Ed., Prentice Hall 1993. (You do not need to purchase this, but you may want to refer to it).
- Hennessy and Patterson, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. 5th Edition. Morgan Kaufmann 2011. (You do not need to purchase this, but you may want to refer to it).
PREREQUISITES
CSc 3210 Computer Organization and Programming (assembly language)
and CSc 4210/6210 (Computer Architecture), or equivalent.
In addition, students are expected to know
discrete structures applicable to computer science, number bases,
logic, sets, Boolean algebra, graph theory.
CONTENT
This course covers multiprocessors (including shared memory as well
as distributed memory systems), vector processing, program and network
properties, scalable performance, memory hierarchy (including cache memory
organization), pipelining, and bus systems. Topical research papers will
also be discussed.
Topics:
- Overview and Review
- transistors, digital logic
- multipliers
- FFT
- cache
- Amdahl's law
- pipelines
- parallel processing
- MACs
- GPUs
- RISC vs CISC, Sparc
- CNN
- ISA review
- Architecture Performance
- Memory and Cache
- Virtual Memory
- Instruction Level Parallelism
- Interrupts
- Branch Prediction
- Extracting More ILP
- Multiprocessors
- Interconnection Networks (time permitting)
My assumptions :
You are here to learn computer architecture as best you can
You will give your best effort
You will read the book
You will come to class on time and stay to the end
You will pay attention and communicate
You will use class time for class-related activities only
Instruction, Research, and Service are the three main components of a university.
How will you serve this class?
GRADING
The nature of the course is that complex questions often have simple,
elegant answers. However, a simple answer with no detail is of little
value, especially if it is incorrect. Therefore, every answer that
you give for this class, including homeworks, quizzes, and tests, should
include an explanation on how you arrived at your answer, assumptions
that you made, any other considerations, and how you know that your
answer is correct. Expect to lose points if the explanation is insufficient.
Expect to lose points if you do not staple your work when it exceeds a page.
Also, we will consider things including
presentation, neatness, legibility, and professionalism when
grading your work. Your work may lose points if it is found lacking.
- Participation and Attendance (and paying attention) will constitute 5% of the course grade.
- A mid-term exam will constitute 20% of the course grade.
- Any Quizzes will factor into the exam grade at 1/10 the weight of the exam.
- Approximately 4 Assignments will constitute 40% of the course grade. (There will be at least 3 assignments, maybe as many as 6). Assignments will include a paper summary, and a literature review. These may be in several parts or forms, such as requiring a written paper, an in-class presentation, a question-answer session, and potentially a video.
- The project will constitute 35% of the course grade. This includes several reports and/or in-class presentations (e.g. a project proposal, a mid-semester update, and a final presentation).