UCSD CSE 240b

cse.240b Parallel Computer Architecture - Spring 2013

Course Goals

This class is designed to enable students to follow the latest developments in computer architecture, especially those related to parallel computer architecture. Although this is clearly useful for those who wish to do research in computer architecture, it is also useful for those who work in related areas or who have general interests. The class strives for these goals through four aspects:

Cover a broad swath of material related to parallel computer architecture, not covered in core-level grad classes.
Providing students with the opportunity to
{ find, analyze, communicate, discuss } advanced material.
Examining fundamental ideas that are the "frontier" of the field and have not yet made it into industry.
Prepare students to lead discussion of topics and filter/assimiliate information quickly.

Prof. Michael Taylor

Topics

Directory Coherence	Memory Consistency
Interconnection Networks	Synchronization
Transactions	Streams
Vector Architectures	Heterogeneous Multi-core
Simultaneous Multi-threading	Cell Architecture
GPUs	Tiled Architectures
CUDA	Cilk
Arsenal Style Processors	Dark Silicon
Your Topic Here

Announcements

April 2	The course forum is up! Make sure to sign up in order to receive important course details. Click here to join. You must give your name as your nickname, and enter in your UCSD email address in the information box. It may take a day or two for you to be comfirmed.
April 2	Yes, one analysis per paper! No analysis for textbook items UNLESS specified below.

Course Materials

The class will consist of readings generally found in the following locations:

IEEE Explore (free access from UCSD network)
For IEEE publications.
ACM Portal (free access from UCSD network)
For ACM publications.
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Hennessy & Patterson.
Hopefully, you already have this.
The Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture. (Free, when accessed from UCSD campus.)

I will not post links to the articles, because I want located these papers to become second nature to you.

If you do not have access to the UCSD network because you are an open enrollment student, then make a friend in the class to help.

Grading

I expect a high level of work quality and independence in this class, since it is an advanced graduate class. Participation in in-class discussions is an integral part of the class, and comprises a significant component of the class participation grade

In true computer architecture form, your Spec240B number (also known as your grade!) includes the multiplication function:

Final Grade

Proof of Reading

Class Participation	20 %
Mini Research Exam (Oral)	25 %
Assignment(s)	15%
Final Paper (Paper)	20 %
Quizzes + "Late Midterm" (held on last day of class)	20 %

(subject to change as class unfolds)

Proof of Reading

Since much of the class will consist of discussions, it is absolutely essential that you do the reading BEFORE class. There is no greater waste of everybody's time than a discussion class where nobody has read the paper. To help keep the quality of class high, we will collect responses to a set of questions for each paper via two links.

Each class period will be separated into two Epochs, with separate readings. Paper Analyses will be due on the following schedule:

Day Due
Epoch I Previous Friday, 11 p.m.
Epoch II Tuesday, 4:30 p.m.

If reading is not explicitly divided between Epoch I and II, then you should split the material evenly across the two Epochs.
For some readings, such as textbook readings, the paper survey form may not make as much sense. To this end, you must submit notes for each EPOC, using this sheet. You will provide a MD5 hash of the notes at the time of submission. If the notes are different than the MD5 hash, or the date of submission is after the deadline, then I will ignore them. Furthermore, I will use a script to retrieve and print the first TWO pages of each epoch's notes (if the MD5 hash matches), and you can make use of them during your last test. You will not be able to use any other materials.

Your submissions must be your original work.
For actual papers, you will use this form: google form.
Your Proof of Reading will be based on the percentage of epochs that you have filled out with thoughtful (but not perfect) answers or logic notes. If 90% appear thoughtful or reasonable, then you will receive full credit. Thus, if an act of god or force majeure causes two Epoch's worth of entries to be unentered, it will not affect your grade. However, the third such event will affect your grade as much as getting 25 % wrong on your final!
If you have concerns over this policy, I recommend you submit early to allow yourself margin for unexpected issues; maybe even the day before! To ensure that you receive credit, you should record your notes in a google doc and then copy it into the form after you are done. This way, if there are any issues with the form, you will be able to show both your content and the times it was written.

Day	Due
Epoch I	Previous Friday, 11 p.m.
Epoch II	Tuesday, 4:30 p.m.

Final Paper

Each student will pick one of the topics that they chose for their oral exam.
They will write a research exam, in the style of the CSE department,
on a sub-topic of this paper. This topic should
be a researchy topic with recent work in the area; i.e. there should be some recent
papers in the last three years that are "opener" papers rather than "closer" papers.

The research exam will have the attributes of a "creative survey". A study list will be defined by the student and the research exam committee. The student is expected to survey the area, including recent developments, identify key themes, and observe open/future directions.
I expect that you will cite at least 20-30 relevant papers for this paper, and in meaningful ways.

The paper will be due via email (.pdf only) by the time of the UCSD scheduled final.

Exams

The mini-research and last test will test different things. The mini-research exams will test your ability to really understand a subject in depth. The last test will cover the breadth of your knowledge of the material in the class. This material will include both the reading and topics that come up in class discussion. Some of these topics will almost certainly not be in the reading. Generally speaking, the last test will be fairly easy if you have done the reading carefully, and participated in the in-class discussion, and jotted down a few keywords to remind yourself what to study (i.e. via internet source) later.

Mini Research Exams

Each student's "mini research exam" consists of presenting (possibly in conjunction with other students) the material that was assigned for a particular day.

This will mirror, to some degree, the research exam that PhD students have to do after their second year in the PhD program. Each day, two students take responsibility for being the "class experts" for a particular set of material that we read. They will give a 40 minute presentation on the material (roughly 40 minutes each). This presentation will motivate the problem the reading is trying to solve, and present the key ideas, using the IMD (ideas, mechanisms, dinosaurs) framework, and propose future directions or questions. Be sure to go through the key architecture mechanisms proposed in the reading in detail.

You must create your own slides; you may not simply download a talk from the internet. However, you may reuse diagrams.
You should read and adhere to this Advice on Giving Talks, which combines wisdom acquired by Professor Swanson and I.
At the end of the presentation, We will have the class fill out evaluation forms given each student feedback on their presentation.
Each student will have to do this a few times, dependent on enrollment.
In order to do this, student experts must read other materials outside the paper (tracing back the references) in order to give the class additional context. It should be clear from the presentation that the students have done this.
I expect that student experts will practice the presentation in order to make sure that it fits in the allotted time and has appropriate transitions. This is a good preparation for giving talks, whether for communicating one's own research, or for a research exam.
Logistically, this works in the following way - students will sign up for a given day ahead of time. They will prepare the slides, and will send them to me on the following schedule:

Day Due
Tuesday Classes Previous Wednesday, 11 p.m.
If I do not receive it by those times, a late penalty may apply. I will follow up with feedback by Sunday at noon, quite but possibly even earlier.
After getting feedback, you will revise the presentation, practice it and then give it in class. During the presentation, students are free to ask questions of the experts, and if a discussion topic arises, we will pause to discuss it.

Day	Due
Tuesday Classes	Previous Wednesday, 11 p.m.

email: mbtaylor at you see ess dee dot ee dee you
web: Michael Taylor's Website.

NOTE: Schedule is highly subject to change.

Tue, April 02	Overview, Administrivia
(Epoch 2) Tue, April 02
Tue, April 09	Tech Trends	Asanovic et al, "The landscape of parallel computing research: a view from berkeley", Tech Report UCB/EECS2006-183.
(Epoch 2) Tue, April 09	Case Study: Raw, a Simple Parallel Machine	The Raw Microprocessor: A Computational Fabric for Software Circuits and General Purpose Programs, Taylor et al, IEEE Micro March/April 2002. The Raw Specification, v 5.0, The Raw Specification, v 5.0.
Tue, April 16	Cache Coherence I	Read "A Primer on Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence", Chap 1-4.
(Epoch 2) Tue, April 16	()
Tue, April 23	Cache Coherence, Part II	Read "A Primer on Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence", Chapter 6-8.
(Epoch 2) Tue, April 23	()
Tue, April 30	Data Parallel	H & P Chapter 4 (Data-Level Parallelism in Vector, SIMD and GPU).
(Epoch 2) Tue, April 30	GPUs/CUDA & Tera	NVIDIA Tesla: A Unified Graphics and Computing Architecture Lindholm, et al. Micro, IEEE Mar 2008. Scalable Parallel Programming with CUDA. Nickolls et al. ACM Queue. 2008.
Tue, May 07	Data Center	Read H&P Chapter 6.
(Epoch 2) Tue, May 07	()	Read Synthesis Lecture: "The Datacenter as a Computer"
Tue, May 14	Dark Silicon	The GreenDroid Mobile Application Processor: An Architecture for Silicon's Dark Future, IEEE Micro 2011, Goulding-Hotta. Read 50 percent of Synthesis Lecture on Dark Silicon.
(Epoch 2) Tue, May 14		Read Rest of Synthesis Lecture on Dark Silicon (preprint). Single-ISA Heterogeneous Multi-Core Architectures: The Potential for Processor Power Reduction, MICRO 2003, Tullsen ISCA 2010; Horowitz; Understanding Sources of Inefficiency in General-Purpose Chips
Tue, May 21	Parallelizing Compilers	Read Synthesis Lecture on "Automatic Parallelization: An Overview of Fundamental Compiler Techniques", Chapter 1-7.
(Epoch 2) Tue, May 21	()
Tue, May 28	On-Chip Networks	Synthesis Lectures on On-Chip Networks
(Epoch 2) Tue, May 28	()
Tue, June 04	Last Test
(Epoch 2) Tue, June 04			slides