CS 538 - Fall 2011

Computer Architecture

Course Description

This course covers typical, standard, and some very advanced topics of Computer Architecture in detail. The standard topics include memory subsystem, processor and instruction set, caching, pipelining, and virtual memory management. The advanced topics include Software Pipelining, Cache Coherence in multi-processor systems, Dynamic Branch Prediction, and Turbo Boost technology. Overall focus, however, is high performance computer architecture. Therefore, we discuss those architectural ideas that enable superior performance by resource replication, and taking advantage of parallelism and locality. This includes superscalar, pipelined, superpiplined, VLIW, and other interesting architectures.

You will write 1 small homework, an in-class midterm, implement a data cache simulator for a uniprocessor system, and simulate a demand-paged Virtual Memory Management system.

For more detail, please refer to Handouts and Homeworks by clicking on the respective buttons below.