This is an overall schedule for CMSC 611. Lists of assignments and due dates are also available on the Class News & Notes page, and information on reading material is available from the syllabus. However, this chart pulls everything together, and also includes links to all of the slides used in class. 1-up slides have one slide per page, and 2-up slides have two slides per page to save paper.
The slides from class are organized by the date on which they were discussed in class. The slides are in PDF format, and can be read with Acrobat Reader, a free program that's available for Macintosh, Windows, and various versions of Unix.
IMPORTANT NOTE: slides are only accessible to machines in the umbc.edu domain. If you're a UMBC student, please access these slides through your UMBC account. If you're not a UMBC student and would like access to these slides, please contact elm@csee.umbc.edu.
If there are no slides listed for a lecture, it's probably because the lecture covers slides from a previous class. The slides are organized by chapter, and a chapter is often covered in more than one class.
This is a tentative schedule, and will be adjusted periodically to reflect how far we've gotten in class. Assignment dates are the dates on which the homework or project was assigned, not its due date (which will be listed on the assignment itself). This schedule is subject to minor changes through the semester. Assignment dates and due dates may be modified slightly to make them conform with the covered material.
Date | Assigned | Due | Read | Topic | Slides |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 Feb | Ch 1 | History, trends & costs | 1up 2up 4up | ||
3 Feb |
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Measuring computer performance | 1up 2up 4up | ||
8 Feb | HW #1 | Ch 2 | Instruction set architectures (ISAs) | 1up 2up 4up | |
10 Feb | ISAs & an example: DLX | From last class | |||
15 Feb | HW #1 |
Ch 3 | Basic pipelining | 1up 2up 4up | |
17 Feb | HW #2 | Project | Pipeline hazards | From last class | |
22 Feb | Exceptions & other pipelining issues | 1up 2up 4up | |||
24 Feb | HW #2 | Multi-cycle pipeline stages | From last class | ||
29 Feb | HW #3 | Project | Ch 4 | Static techniques for instruction-level parallelism | 1up 2up 4up |
2 Mar | Dynamic scheduling | 1up 2up 4up | |||
7 Mar | HW #3 | Branch prediction | 1up 2up 4up | ||
9 Mar | Superscalar & VLIW techniques | 1up 2up 4up | |||
14 Mar | App B | Vector processing | 1up 2up 4up | ||
16 Mar | HW #4 | Vector processing | 1up 2up 4up | ||
21 Mar | Spring Break | ||||
23 Mar | Spring Break | ||||
28 Mar | Class canceled | ||||
30 Mar | HW #4 | Article |
Case studies: AMD K7 & PowerPC G4 / midterm review
|
1up 2up 4up | |
4 Apr | MIDTERM (in class, Tuesday April 4th): covers material through March 30th | ||||
6 Apr | Project | Ch 5 | Cache basics | 1up 2up 4up | |
11 Apr | Improving cache performance | 1up 2up 4up | |||
13 Apr | Improving cache performance (continued) | 1up 2up 4up | |||
18 Apr | HW #5 | Main memory, VM & TLB issues | 1up 2up 4up | ||
20 Apr | Ch 8 | Multiprocessor design issues | 1up 2up 4up | ||
25 Apr | HW #5 | Multiprocessor cache coherence | 1up 2up 4up | ||
27 Apr | Project | Ch 6 | Storage devices | 1up 2up 4up | |
2 May | Storage performance issues | 1up 2up 4up | |||
4 May | HW #7 | HW #6 | Wrap up storage & future directions in computer architecture | 1up 2up 4up | |
9 May | Project presentations | - | |||
11 May | HW #7 | Project presentations (NOTE: class runs until 8:15 PM!) | - | ||
16 May | Project | Class canceled | - | ||
18 May | FINAL EXAM (MP 104, Thursday, May 18th, 6-8 PM): covers material from the entire semester |