CS570 Advanced Computer Architecture (3 cr. sect. 1) -- Spring 2022

Lecture
15:15-16:30, Tuesday, Thursday, Stuart Building 238

Prerequest
CS470 or equivalent

Last Modified: Jan. 3, 2022

Contents

All information provide here in are tentative and subject to minor change



General Information

Instructor
Xian-He Sun, email: sun@iit.edu

Office Hours

4:30 to 5:30p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, after class, or by appointment



Course Description

This course is about advanced computer architecture. It teaches the science and art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create a computer that meets functional, performance and cost goals, and teaches the qualitative and quantitative examination of computer design tradeoffs. We cover the system architecture, processor technology, advanced memory hierarchy, new memory technology (NVM, 3D Xpoint) and I/O organization, power and energy management, and reliability, and conver the new development in multicore, accelerators, data center design, and parallel I/O. We will learn, for example, how uniprocessors execute many instructions concurrently and why state-of-the-art memory systems are nearly as complex as processors, and etc. We will follow the text by Patterson and Hennessy, with additional material pulling from the instructor's research and other recources. Assignments will include problems from the end of the chapters as will as some selected exercises. For the last part of the course we will read an assortment of papers and work on different term projects. The community GEM5 simulator will be used in this class.

Topics include:



Course Materials

Text
John L. Hennessy David A. Patterson
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (6th Edition)
Morgan Kaufmann, 2017, ISBN: 9780128119051 (eBook ISBN: 9780128119068) (see here for additional resources related to the text.)

Reference
William Stallings
Computer Organization and Architecture: Designing for Performance, 10/E
Person, 2016, ISBN-13: 978-0-13-410161-3 (see here for additional resources related to the text.)
On-Line Resources
Computer Architecture Web site

Lecture Script

(Subject to Change)


Assignments

Assignments will be given. Normally these will be due in two weeks. Large assignments and the term project will be given longer periods of time.

Solutions

Solutions of the homeworks and program assignments may be provided from time to time to meet the need.

Term Project



Communication

The course will use blackboard for communication.

On individual matters, please feel free to contact your instructor via email.



Evaluation