Computer Architecture. 3 credits, 3 contact hours

Catalog description

Prerequisites: No formal prerequisites – The course assumes knowledge of topics of CS 350 or equivalent courses. The course offers a foundation for students in computing. The main topics are exploiting parallelism, memory hierarchy, storage systems, multicore systems, vector machines, GPUs, and multiprocessors. Exploiting parallelism includes instruction, data, and thread-level parallelism as well as pipelining, out-of-order, and speculative execution. Cybersecurity issues arising out of speculative execution will be discussed. Topics of memory hierarchy consist of main memory, three levels of caches, and virtual memory. Storage systems include hard disks, solid state disks, and non-volatile memory. Multicore processors that employ performance and efficiency cores will be discussed to highlight distinctive performance and power requirements for various devices including cell phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and servers. Discussion on high performance machines such as shared-memory and distributed-memory multiprocessors and their respective programming environments OpenMP and MPI concludes the course.