COMP 3370 ROASS

COMP 3370 Computer Organization
ROASS

Course Description
(Formerly 074.337) Principles of computer systems architecture, organization and design. Performance, instruction sets, processors, input/output, memory hierarchies. Prerequisite: COMP 2280 (or 074.228 or 074.222) (C).

Website
www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~comp3370/

Registration Advisory
It is your responsibility to ensure that you are entitled to be registered in this course. This means that you:

have the appropriate prerequisites, as noted in the calendar description, or have permission from the instructor to waive these prerequisites;
have not previously taken, or are concurrently registered in, this course and another that has been identified as "not to be held with" in the course description. For example, BIOL 1000 cannot be held for credit with BIOL 1020.

The registration system may have allowed you to register in this course, but it is your responsibility to check. If you are not entitled to be in this course, you will be withdrawn, or the course may not be used in your degree program. There will be no fee adjustment. This is not appealable. Please be sure to read the course description for this and every course in which you are registered.

Important Dates
Please see the Important Dates section of the U of M General Calendar for information on holidays, exams, and voluntary withdrawal dates.

Academic Dishonesty
Plagiarism on the assignments or any form of cheating during the examination is subject to serious academic penalty. If you are not sure what constitutes academic dishonesty consult section 7 of the general calendar academic regulations.

We have specific Faculty of Science regulations that you must follow. Please look here for full details.

A signed honesty declaration must be included with an assignment for its mark to be counted towards your final grade.

Textbook
None required.

If you feel you need a textbook, you can purchase a copy of Computer Organization & Design The Hardware/Software Interface by Patterson and Hennessy (Second Edition, Morgan Kaufmann publishers).

Course Outline
This course focuses on computer performance (through hardware design) and how it affects the development of software. Topics include (but are not limited to):

Review
Measuring Performance
Memory Systems and the Memory Hierarchy
Advanced I/O
CPU Architecture
Introduction to Parallelism (we'll see how far we get...)

Mark Breakdown

3 Assignments - 30%
Midterm Test - 20%
Final Exam - 50%

Assignments
There will be 3 assignments worth a total of 30% towards your final grade. The assignments will involve programming in C/C++ under Unix. You must adhere to the assignment guidelines to ensure your assignment will not be rejected. Please note that late assignments will generally not be accepted. At least one assignment will be returned to you prior to the VW (Voluntary Withdrawal) deadline.

Midterm Test
The test will be written during a regularly scheduled class, and will contribute 20% towards your final grade.

Final Exam
The final exam will be 2 hours in length and is worth 50% of your final grade. Time and locale to be announced by the Student Records Office. You are reminded that you are obligated to make yourself available for the writing of the final exam.