Administrivia

Textbook and Recommended Readings

The text book for this course is Computer Organization & Design: The Hardware / Software Interface by Patterson and Hennessy. The optional reference for this course is MIPS RISC Architecture, by Kane and Heinrich, and the paper SPIM S20: A MIPS R2000 Simulator by J Larus will serve both as a quick reference for the instruction set and as a manual for using the xspim emulator.

Office Hours

My office is in AP&M 5141, and my office hours are Tuesdays and Wednesday 1:30pm-2:30pm (this may change later in the quarter). You can make appointments for other times. You should feel free to stop by at other times as well, but I may ask you to come back at another time if I'm busy.

The TA for the course is Stephane Belmon. Stephane's office hours are 9am-10am Mondays and Wednesdays in AP&M 3337A. There are 5 tutors for the course as well. Their names and lab hours are:

Seang Chau	MW 2-3p
Kevin Berggren	Tu 6-8p
Bevan Schroeder	Tu 8-10p
David Beattie	Th 8-10p
Michael Chen	F 12-2p

Note that David Beattie will be out of town the 16th and 23rd.

Grading

This course will have around 6 homework assignments; some of these may be larger projects; they will mostly be done on-line. There will be an in-class midterm and a final.

Grading will be based on the following percentages:

Homework	30%
Midterm	30%
Final	40%

Grade cut-offs will be determined from ``natural'' breaks in the score distribution rather than straight percentage cut-offs or simple curving. If all of you learn the material, I will be happy to give everyone an ``A''; conversely, if none of you learn the material, I will be (less) happy to give everyone an ``F''.

As I said in class, comments will in general count for 40% of a programming assignment's grade. Comments are very important because they are how you communicate with the next programmer who has to pick up your code; if your program is not understandable, it may have to be rewritten from scratch. Real-life products have had portions thrown away and rewritten because of such problems.

You should be using the URL http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/classes/fa97/cse30/ to reach the class Webnotes page. If that server is down, you may also try using http://work.ucsd.edu:5141/cse30/. (Use the latter only if the former is down; work.ucsd.edu is my desktop workstation; the web pages archived there are not necessarily up-to-date.)

bsy@cse.ucsd.edu, last updated Sun Oct 26 23:14:17 PST 1997.

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