Syllabus
CMSC 611: Advanced Computer Architecture
Fall 1996
Time:
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Mon & Wed 5:30 - 6:45 PM
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Location:
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MP 010
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Instructor:
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Dr. Ethan Miller
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1. Measuring Performance & Cost
- Performance measurement
- Benchmarks
- Costs of building computers
- Price/performance
2. Instruction Sets
- Classifying instruction sets
- Interactions between languages and instruction sets
- Measuring instruction set usage
- Instruction set examples
3. Improving CPU Performance: Pipelining
- Basic pipelining
- Data & control hazards
- Dynamic instruction scheduling
- Branch prediction
- Instruction-level parallelism
4. Vector Processors
- Vector architecture & design
- Vector performance
5. Memory Hierarchies
- Evaluating memory hierarchy performance
- Cache design & optimization
- Virtual memory design
- Memory protection
- Memory coherency
6. Storage Systems
- Types and uses of storage devices
- Interfacing I/O to the rest of the system
- Reliability and availability
- I/O system design
7. Interconnection Networks
- Network basics
- Connection topologies
- Network protocols for parallel processing
8. Multiprocessors
- Classifying parallel architectures
- Centralized vs. distributed shared memory
- Synchronization
- Memory consistency
Related information
Last updated
by
Ethan Miller
(elm@cs.umbc.edu)