Computer Systems and Concepts

Catalog description

This course provides an integrated survey of fundamental ideas in the areas of computer architecture; operating systems; and programming language specification and translation. The focus of this course is on the computer organization of a computer system, including the processor architecture and the memory system. In particular, we will discuss the internal representation of information, instruction set architectures and implementation techniques for computer arithmetic, control path design, and pipelining. We examine the hardware and software components required to go from a program expressed in a high-level programming language like C to the computer actually running the program. This course takes a bottom-up approach to discovering how a computer works, and introduces basic concepts of operating systems, compilers and interpreters.