CSE 241 -- Advanced Computer Architecture

Spring 2001, Instructor: Dean Tullsen

Announcements:

Homework assignments

Basic Course Information:

Instructor: Dean Tullsen

AP&M 4250
tullsen@cs
office hours: M 11:30-12:30, Th 2-3

Meeting times

MW 10:10-11:30, AP&M 4218

Course textbook

Patterson & Hennessy, "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach", Morgan Kaufmann, Second Edition
Hill, Jouppi, Sohi, "Readings in Computer Architecture", Morgan Kaufmann
these will be supplemented with other readings during the course. Stay tuned.

Other recommended reading

CPU Info Center

everything you'd ever want to know about available commercial CPUs

WWW Computer Architecture Home Page

a comprehensive guide to research and general information on computer architecture available on the web.

Assignments will be quite varied. Examples of things you may be asked to do in this class:

problem sets
paper summaries -- a paper summary is no more than 2 pages long, and contains the following information: (1) summary of the paper, (2) What is the most important result?, (3) One strength of the paper, (4) one weakness of the paper, (5) one thing you didn't understand, (6) if you wrote this paper, what would your next paper be about?
mini-project -- this could be either an easy programming project or an easy simulation project.
project -- this is a unique piece of work, done in groups of 1-3, of high depth and quality.

Grades will be determined something like this:

homework, paper summaries, mini-projects 20%
project 30%
midterm 15%
final 25%
class participation 10%

Class will be a combination of lecture and guided discussion. Make sure you come prepared for the latter. If not, I will bump up the portion of the grade for class participation until I am happy with the level of discussion.
A class mailing list will be set up. Make sure you're on it.

Course Outline:

I. Parallel Computer Architecture

cache coherence protocols
synchronization
consistency models
case studies

II. Historical Architectures

III. Instruction Level Parallelism

branch prediction
ILP limits
predicated execution
dynamic scheduling
case studies

IV. Cache/Memory Hierarchy

V. I/O Architecture

VI. Other Interesting Architectures

dataflow machines
multithreading
trace processors
speculative threading

Class	Readings (Very approximate, at this point!)
April 2	Introduction
April 4	H&P 8.1-8.4, hw#1 due April 11
April 9	H&P 8.5, 8.6
April 11	H&P 8.7-8.11
April 16	The DASH Prototype: Logic Overhead and Performance.
April 18
April 23	Memory Consistency in Shared Virtual Memory Systems, Is SC + ILP = RC?
April 25	Architecture and Applications of the HEP multiprocessor computing system, The Tera Computer System, Exploiting Choice: Instruction Fetch and Issue on an Implementable Simultaneous Multithreading Processor
April 30	Tera Hardware-Software Cooperation
May 2	(1)Architecture of the IBM System/360 (2) Parallel Operation in the Control Data 6600 (3) The CRAY-1 Computer System (4) CRAY-1 Computer Technology also read pages 1-16 of the text (pages 1-55 in total)
May 7	(1) Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circtuits, (2) Two-Level Adaptive Training Branch Prediction
May 9	(1) Combining Branch Predictors (2) The YAGS branch prediction scheme
May 14	*midterm*
May 16	(1) A Comparison of Full and Partial Predicated Execution Support for ILP Processors (2) Instruction Issue Logic for High-Performance, Interruptable Pipelined Processors (3) Highly accurate data value prediction using hybrid predictors
May 21	(1) The Alpha 21264 Microprocessor (2) The MIPS R10000 Superscalar Microprocessor
May 23	(1) Improving Direct-Mapped Cache ... (Jouppi) (2) Organization and Performance of a Two-Level ... (Wang, Baer, Levy)
May 28	Memorial Day Holiday
May 30	(1) Trace Cache: A Low Latency Approach to High Bandwidth Instruction Fetching (2) Putting the fill unit to work: dynamic optimizations for trace cache microprocessors (3) Trace Processors
June 4	(1) Multiscalar Processors (2) Threaded Multi-path Execution
June 6	Project Presentations

If you have comments or suggestions, email me at tullsen@cs.ucsd.edu