Syllabus

1. Measuring Performance & Cost

• Performance measurement
• Benchmarks
• Costs of building computers
• Price/performance

2. Instruction Sets

• Classifying instruction sets
• Interactions between languages and instruction sets
• Measuring instruction set usage
• Instruction set examples

3. Improving CPU Performance: Pipelining

• Basic pipelining
• Data & control hazards
• Dynamic instruction scheduling
• Branch prediction
• Instruction-level parallelism

4. Vector Processors

• Vector architecture & design
• Vector performance

5. Memory Hierarchies

• Evaluating memory hierarchy performance
• Cache design & optimization
• Virtual memory design
• Memory protection
• Memory coherency

6. Storage Systems

• Types and uses of storage devices
• Interfacing I/O to the rest of the system
• Reliability and availability
• I/O system design

7. Interconnection Networks

• Network basics
• Connection topologies
• Network protocols for parallel processing

8. Multiprocessors

• Classifying parallel architectures
• Centralized vs. distributed shared memory
• Synchronization
• Memory consistency

Related information

• CMSC 611 main page for Fall 1995
• General course information
• CMSC 611 listings for all semesters
• CMSC 811 - Advanced Topics in Computer Architecture