Advanced Computer Architecture (6 CP, 3V+2Ü)

This course will be given in English.

Subject and Goal

The course Advanced Computer Architecture teaches concepts and methods used in modern processor architecture to exploit the available parallelism at the levels of instructions, data and threads. The course covers the following topics:

  • Fundamentals of computer architectures
  • Memory hierarchy design
  • Instruction-level parallelism
  • Data-level parallelism: Vector, SIMD and GPU architectures
  • Thread-level parallelism
  • Warehouse-scale computers
  • Domain-specific architectures

The main reference for the course is the following book: Hennessy, Patterson: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (6th edition), Morgan Kaufmann, 2017.

Dates and Materials

The course includes lectures, paper & pencil exercises and lab assignments. Teaching hours are on Monday, 11:15-13:45 and Tuesday, 14:15-15:45 in room O2, starting with October 8, 2018.

The course materials will be provided via the following PANDA course.

Prerequisites

There are no formal prerequisites for taking this course. However, we expect that students have taken a Bachelor-level computer architecture course. Such a course should provide basic knowledge in instruction set architectures, assembly language programming, processor performance evaluation, data path and controller design, pipelining, and memory hierarchies. The following book covers this Bachelor-level material: Hennessy, Patterson: Computer Organization and Design MIPS Edition (5th edition), Morgan Kaufmann, 2013.