COMP4690 Syllabus...

COMP4690 Computer Systems and Architecture
Syllabus

Course Description

(Formerly 074.469) Investigation of today's modern computer architecture and system design concepts, including requirements, specifications, and implementation. Instruction sets, instruction-level parallelism, speculative execution, multi-threaded architectures, memory hierarchy, multiprocessors, storage design and implementation, and interconnection networks.

Prerequisite: COMP 3370 (or 074.337) (C). 3.000 Credit Hours

Course Evaluation

There will be three assignments, one project and two term tests (no final examination). At least one assignment and one term test will be marked and returned before the voluntary withdrawal deadline (November 12, 2008). The mark breakdown is as follows:

    3 Assignments		24%
    Term project		16%
    2 Term tests		60%

Each assignment is intended to introduce you to issues associated with the application of one or more of the techniques discussed in class. The assignments will mostly be written. Some programming may be required. All assignments will be due at the dates and times specified on each. No late assignment will be accepted. The term tests will be held in class on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 and Thursday, November 27th, 2008. Please be sure to be available for them.

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. A signed honesty declaration must be included with an assignment for its mark to be counted towards your final grade. A copy of the honesty document is available at:

http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/newsite/honesty.htm

Topics

Introduction and review [1 1/2 weeks]
- Design issues, technologies and tools
Advanced ILP [2 1/2 weeks]
- Out of order execution, branch prediction, register renaming, value prediction
Introduction to Parallel Architectures [1 1/2 weeks]
- Motivation, challenge, strategies
Multiprocessor Architectures [2 weeks]
- Cache coherence, UMA, NUMA, COMA
Clusters and their Interconnection [1 1/2 weeks]
- Programming support, interconnection fabrics
High Performance Memory Systems [1 1/2 weeks]
- Bandwidth and latency, interleaving, PIM
High Performance I/O and Storage [1 1/2 weeks]
- Parallel I/O, scalability
Evolving Architectures [1 week]
- Multi-threaded, cellular and custom architectureS

Textbook and References

John Hennessy and David Patterson, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Third Edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 2003 (optional).