CSE-602 Advanced Computer Architecture, Fall 1995



Course Description

This is an advanced computer architecture course. Students who want to take this course are expected to have the level of maturity in computer architecture as covered in the first seven chapters of the first edition of Hennessy & Patterson's book. If you don't have that background and still want to take this course, please come and talk to me first. An important thing to remember before you decide to take this course is that you have to be committed to do a good job in the homeworks and class projects to learn anything useful out of the course. That is, it is very unlikely to get anything out of the course just by auditing the course. The course will be largely in the form of lectures, although class discussion is certainly always encouraged. The emphasis of the course will shift from processor architecture to system-level issues such as memory hierarchy, networking hardware, and I/O devices.

In the first half of the course, there will be three homeworks, each of which will involve various amount of programming. The idea of these exercises is to get the students' hands dirty and to allow them to appreciate the nuts and bolts of carrying out computer architectural studies. No late home works beyond the official deadline will be accepted. In the second half, students are organized as teams of at most two to study a particular topic. A list of potential topics will be distributed early in the semester. In the end, each team needs to make a 30-minute presentation of their resultsto the class. In addition, every team is asked to turn in a publication-quality research paper documenting the experiments, results, and analysis. There will also be two midterms, but no final exam.


Administrative Matters


Special Needs

If you have a disability, such as a physical or mental disability, which will make it difficult for you to carry out the work in CSE-602 or which requires extra time on examinations, please notify Professor Chiueh during the first two weeks of the course so that appropriate arrangements can be made.


Handouts