cse240a: Graduate Computer Architecture

Pepper Canyon Hall 122
Lectures Tuesday & Thursday, 8:00am-9:20am (Pepper Canyon Hall 122)
Spring, 2014
Shortcuts: Schedule Homeworks Projects

Instructor

Steven Swanson

Email:

swanson

cs.ucsd.edu

IM (not email): professorswanson@{AIM, Yahoo!, google talk, MS Messenger}
Office: EBU3B 3212
Office Hours: Wed 12-1; Thurs 3-4; By appointment
UCSD homepage

Teaching Assistants

Sriskanda Shamasunder

Email:

sshamasu

cs.ucsd.edu

Office: EBU3B B275A
Office Hours: Wed 1pm-3pm

Usha Subburaj

Email:

usubbura

cs.ucsd.edu

Office: CSE B250A
Office Hours: Mon 4.30-6.30

Course discussion board: Piazza. Required reading. Get signed up.

Course Description

This course will describe the basics of modern processor operation. Topics include computer system performance, power issues, memory, multiprocessors, pipelining, instruction-level parallelism, storage systems, GPUs, and virtual machines.

Text books

Required: Patterson & Hennessy, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 5th Edition, Patterson & Hennessy, Morgan Kaufmann, 5th Edition I refer to it as "P+H" below.
Required: Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture You'll need to be on campus to access these, but they are free. I refer to them as SLOCAs below.
Required: Other assigned readings throughout the quarter.
Optional: The History of Computing This a great set of lectures from a course taught at UCSD/UW/Berkeley several years ago. Most of them are by the folks that actually made the history (Steve Wozniak, Ray Ozzie, Gordon Bell, etc.).

Grading

Class participation	15%
Assignments	20%
Prefetching contest	15%
Midterm	25%	The midterm is on 6th May, 2014.
Final	25%	The final will be cummulative.

Additional notes about grades in this course:

Calculating grades I compute grades using an Excel spread sheet. In the interests of transparancy, the current grade sheet (with identifying information removed) is avaiable in PDF format. The grade sheet contains all the information about curves and how the grades are computed. It is somewhat sophisticated, if you find bugs please bring them to my attention. Please note that some versions of OpenOffice do not perform the calculations properly, and will give incorrect results.

The grading systems is based on a 13 point (F through A+) scale. For each assignment/test/etc, the sheet computes the letter grade (rounding up, when needed) according to a curve for each assignment (specified at the bottom of each assignments column). Your final grade is the weighted average of these grades.

We do our best to record grades accurately, but you should double-check.
Errors in grading If you feel there has been an error in how an assignment or test was graded, you have one week from when the assignment is return to bring it to our attention. You must submit (via email to the instructor and the appropriate TAs) a written description of the problem.

For arithmetic errors (adding up points etc.) you do not need to submit anything in writing, but the one week limit still applies.
Final grades If you have a problem with your final grade in the course, send me email and we can set up an appoinment to discuss it. Like you, I generally go on a vacation after the quarter ends, so it may take a little while for me to get back to you and the meeting will likely be the next quarter. If the problem needs to be resolved sooner make that clear in the first line of your email.

Schedule

I will post the slides for most lectures.

Reading should be done before class on the day they are listed. It is essential that you do the readings.

Date	Topic	Readings	Slides	Due	Notes
Tuesday, April 1	Introduction and Administrivia		00_Introduction_plus_logistics.pdf
Thursday, April 3	Silicon Scaling	Appendix A (if you architecture is rusty); P+H 1.1-1.12 (this is the original paper about Moore's Law): Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits, G.E. Moore, Proceedings of the IEEE 86(1):82-85, Jan 1998 link.	01_History_BuildingChips_MooresLaw.pdf
Tuesday, April 8	Measuring and Thinking About Performance; Power	SLOCA: "COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE TECHNIQUES FOR POWER-EFFICIENCY" 1-1.4; 2-2.2.2, 3-3.2.1, 4-4.2.1, 5.0-5.1.1; Conservation cores: reducing the energy of mature computations, Ganesh Venkatesh, Jack Sampson, Nathan Goulding, Saturnino Garcia, Vladyslav Bryksin, Jose Lugo-Martinez, Steven Swanson, and Michael Bedford Taylor, Proceedings of the fifteenth edition of ASPLOS on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems, New York, NY, USA, 2010, pages 205-218
Thursday, April 10	More on power	Same as last time	02_Amdahls_Law.pdf
Tuesday, April 15	Instruction Sets	Review Appendix A, if you need a refresher on ISAs. The case for the reduced instruction set computer, David A. Patterson and David R. Ditzel, SIGARCH Comput. Archit. News 8(6):25-33, 1980. CryptoManiac: a fast flexible architecture for secure communication, Lisa Wu, Chris Weaver, and Todd Austin, ISCA '01: Proceedings of the 28th annual international symposium on Computer architecture, New York, NY, USA, 2001, pages 110-119 link.	CryptoManiac.pdf, RISC.pdf
Thursday, April 17	Memory Hierarchy	H+P: B.1-B.3, 2.1-2.2 Improving direct-mapped cache performance by the addition of a small fully-associative cache and prefetch buffers, Norman P. Jouppi, SIGARCH Comput. Archit. News 18(3a):364-373, 1990. Retrospective: improving direct-mapped cache performance by the addition of a small fully-associative cache and prefetch buffers, Norman P. Jouppi, ISCA '98: 25 years of the international symposia on Computer architecture (selected papers), New York, NY, USA, 1998, pages 71-73.	03_Caching.pdf
Tuesday, April 22	Processor Pipelines and Out-of-Order Execution	Appendix C : Pages C1-34, 51-58 : I strongly recommend reviewing this if not familiar with pipelining Chapters 3.1, 3.4-3.6, 3.8 An efficient algorithm for exploiting multiple arithmetic units, R.M. Tomasulo , IBM J. Res. Dev. 11(1):25-33, 1967.
Thursday, April 24	No class	TBA
Tuesday, April 29	Processor Pipelines and Out-of-Order Execution	Same as last time	04_Pipelining_annotated.pdf, PrefetcherContest.pdf
Thursday, May 1	Midterm Review
Tuesday, May 6	Midterm Exam				8:00am - 9:20am
Thursday, May 8	Chip Multiprocessors	H+P Chapters 5.1-5.4 SLOCA: Chip Multiprocessor Architecture: Techniques to Improve Throughput and Latency 1.1 -1.4	15_CMPs.pdf
Tuesday, May 13	Chip Multiprocessors	Same as last time
Thursday, May 15	Multiprocessor memories	H+P Chapters 5.5-5.10 SLOCA: A Primer on Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence. Chapter 1-3.7; 5.1-5.2.2	15_Coherence_and_Consistency.pdf
Tuesday, May 20	Multithreading	SLOCA: Multithreading Architecture Chapter 1-5	03_VM.pdf, 16_MT.pdf
Thursday, May 22	Branch Prediction	Appendix C: pages C-21 to C-30 ( If you didn't read it earlier) Combining Branch Predictors,McFarling, Scott,Tech. Rep. TN-36m, Digital Western Research Laboratory ,June 1993	17_BranchPrediction.pdf
Tuesday, May 27	Storage	TBD	00_Academic Honesty.pdf, 20_Storage.pdf
Thursday, May 29	Storage + potpourri	TBD	20_Storage_2.pdf
Tuesday, June 3	GPU	H+P 4.1 , 4.4-4.7	18_GPUs.pdf	Project 1;
Thursday, June 5	Final Review
Thursday, June 12	Final Exam				8:00am - 10:59am

Integrity Policy

Cheating WILL be taken seriously. Doing otherwise is not fair to honest students. It is also not fair to allow the cheater to thing that it is a reasonable alternative in life.
Please review the UCSD student handbook for more details on Academic Integrity.
Anyone copying information or having information copied during a test will receive an F for the class and will not be allowed to drop. They will be reported to their college dean. If you can prove non-cooperative copying took place, your grade may be restored, but you must prove it to the dean--I don't want to be involved. Anyone caught cheating or falsely representing the work of others on the homework will not be allowed to turn in further homework. Your grade will be based exclusively on the tests with a penalty of 25% OR GREATER applied.
We photocopy a random sampling of the exams in order to ensure that students do not modify their tests after they have been returned.
Online solutions, etc.: A solutions manual exists for this text. Using it, or any solutions you may find on the internet elsewhere IS CHEATING and will be dealt with accordingly. We know what the solution manual solutions look like. Homework is a small fraction of your grade.

Homework

Homeworks are due at the start of the class on the due date unless otherwise noted.
Late assignments will not be accepted.
There is no regrading of written homeworks, except for errors adding up points. No single problem will have a significant impact on your grade.
Typically, homework assignments may be graded based on a statistical subset of the problems in each assignment.
Please ensure you submit typed solutions.
You are strongly encouraged to work on assignments in groups of two. If you do work in a group of 2, submit only 1 report (but make sure both names are on it). While you may have your partner do all the work, this will only hurt you when the midterm and final come around so don't do it.

Assignment 1: In the words of Jeremy Clarkson - "POWERRR!"
Assignment 2: Cache me if you can
Assignment 3: To branch or not to branch

Projects

Project 1: Prefetching competition