Computer Science / Electrical Engineering 375:
Computer Architecture and Organization

Fall 2009

Current

• Final Exam will be Wed. Jan. 20, 1:30 PM, in Friend 108
• Fine print on what you can bring to the exam: the textbook, your own notes and homeworks and midterm exam, and that's it. No other books or notes or materials not written by you. (No Google etc. of course.)

Syllabus

• Course description
• Administrative matters
• Requirements
  • Class participation
  • Mini problem sets
  • Examinations
  • Design project
• Reading
• Schedule

Past

• Announcements, etc.
  • Abhishek's office hours: Mondays and Thursdays, 3-4 PM
  • Project links have been moved into the Syllabus
  • Abhishek has slightly updated the project description to clarify where test cases may be found.
  • Extra class during Reading Period: Wed. Jan 6. Exam prep and/or project clinic.
  • Some of you have asked whether you need to model forwarding in your cycle-accurate simulator. Answer: yes.
• Reading/writing assignments and discussion topics, by class number: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22
• Enrichment links:
  • Might as well check out EDSAC on Wikipedia
  • Here's Maurice Wilkes' homepage
  • How to design an instruction set architecture, from 1947: Burks, Goldstine, and von Neumann's "Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument"
  • Floating point is for wimps, at least if you believe von Neumann: see section 5.3 of his paper.
  • To improve your understanding of the two views of time in pipeline waterfall charts ("program time" and "pipeline time"), try this. It's really cold.
  • And who invented caching? Who else? Here's the paper, from 1965.
  • The virtual memory concept somehow appears not to have been invented by Maurice Wilkes, but did nevertheless originate in the Sceptred Isle: here's the paper, from 1961.
  • For another take on virtual memory, read The Paging Game.