Computer Systems Architecture

Catalog description

Course focuses on how to build modern computing systems, namely notebooks, smartphones, and data centers, covering primarily their hardware architecture and certain system software aspects. For each system class, we cover the system architecture, processor technology, advanced memory hierarchy and I/O organization, power and energy management, and reliability. We will also cover topics such as interactions with system software, virtualization, solid state storage, and security. The programming assignments allow students to explore performance/energy tradeoffs when using heterogeneous hardware resources on smartphone devices.