Last change:
Thu May 11 17:54 EDT 2006
Tue May 9 17:35 EDT 2006
Thu May 4 17:50 EDT 2006
Wed May 3 11:31 EDT 2006
Instructor: Dr. Marc Olano <ola...@umbc.edu>
ITE 354 (455-3094); Office Hours: Tue Thu 2:45-3:45
TA: Balaji Valady-Viswanathan
ITE 368; Office Hours: Tue 10:00-12:00
Prerequisite: CMSC 411 or equivalent
Text: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 3rd edition, John L Hennessy and David A Patterson. Required.
Goal: Develop an understanding of the principles and practices employed in the design and evaluation of processors and computer systems.
Your grades will be based on homework assignments given approximately every other week, an in-class mid-term, a cumulative final exam, and a final project (done in groups of 2-3). The total grade breakdown will be as follows:
| 30%: | Homework | |
| 25%: | Mid-term exam | |
| 25%: | Final | |
| 20%: | Project |
Homework assignments submitted up to one week late will be penalized 20 percent of the possible score. Assignments more than one week late will receive a score of 0. Each student gets one free "late" (i.e. up to one week late without penalty, but still zero if later than one week) to apply to any of the assignments. Your free late must be claimed in writing by email to the professor on or before the due date.
By enrolling in this course, each student assumes the responsibilities of an active participant in UMBC's scholarly community in which everyone's academic work and behavior are held to the highest standards of honesty. Cheating, fabrication, plagiarism, and helping others to commit these acts are all forms of academic dishonesty, and they are wrong. Academic misconduct could result in disciplinary action that may include, but is not limited to, suspension or dismissal. To read the full Student Academic Conduct Policy, consult the UMBC Student Handbook, the Faculty Handbook, or the UMBC Policies section of the UMBC Directory, or the Graduate School website.
All assignments in the course are expected to be your individual work. You may discuss assignments, however any help you receive must be documented. At the beginning of each or assignment, you must include a statement indicating the sources you used while working on it (excluding course staff and text) and the type of help you received from each. If you received no help, say so. Failure to include this comment will result in your assignment being returned ungraded.
Homeworks are marked to show whether they will be due on the Tuesday (Tue) or Thursday (Thu) of each indicated week.
Readings should be completed before the first date listed below for maximum benefit. In many cases, the readings may be lengthy (covering most of a 1000+ page book over the course of the semester). You are, of course, free to choose your own strategy. At the very least, I'd recommend skimming the readings before class then re-reading difficult sections in depth after class. Without a doubt, prior exposure to the concepts we will be covering will aid your understanding.
| Date | Topic | Reading | Due dates |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 31,Feb 2 | Introduction | ||
| Feb 7,9 | Cost, Performance & Benchmarking | Ch 1 | |
| Feb 14,16 | Instruction set design | Ch 2 | Tue: HW1 (1.1, 1.21c) |
| Feb 21,23 | Compilers and ISA | Ch 3 | Tue: Select Team and Project app+user by email |
| Feb 28,Mar 2 | Pipelining & Pipeline Hazards | Ch 4, A | Tue: HW2 (2.6, 2.16) |
| Mar 7,9 | Instruction-level parallelism | ||
| Mar 14,16 | Scoreboard, Tomasulo | Thu: HW3 (3.1, 3.4b-e, 2.12=20pts extra) | |
| Mar 21,23 | Spring Break! | ||
| Mar 28,30 | Review, Midterm | ||
| Apr 4,6 | Exam review, Tomasulo, Branch prediction | ||
| Apr 11,13 | Branch prediction, Hardware description languages and simulation | See below | Thu: HW4 (3.7, 3.15, A.13=20 pts extra) |
| Apr 18,20 | Cache | Ch 5 | |
| Apr 25,27 | Memory, storage | Ch 7 | Thu: HW5 (5.4, 5.13, 5.3=15 pts extra) |
| May 2,4 | Storage & I/O, Parallel systems | Ch 6 | |
| May 9,11 | Shared & Distributed memory, Interconnection Networks | Ch 8 | Tue: HW6 (7.3, 7.5 OR 7.7, 7.11=15 pts extra) |
| May 16 | Review | Tue: Project hardcopy in class | |
| May 23 | Final exam, 3:30 – 5:30, ITE 227 | ||
This syllabus is a snapshot of the class web page (www.cs.umbc.edu/~olano/611/). Important announcements and updates will be made to this page throughout the semester. I will announce at the beginning of class if I make a significant change or addition, and date stamps of the latest several changes will appear on top of the page.
There is also a class email list for announcements and public student questions: cmsc611@listproc.umbc.edu. Your classmates will get this email, so you should not use the list for private or grade-related comments, but feel free to use it as a means to ask public questions of me, the TA, or your fellow students. The list will only accept mail from subscribed addresses. I have pre-subscribed the umbc.edu address for each student enrolled in the course as of Friday, January 27th. You can add, change or remove your umbc.edu address subscription using the web interface at listproc.umbc.edu. To subscribe a non-umbc.edu address, you'll need to use the email interface, documented in the ListProc Users FAQ at listproc.umbc.edu/user/