Lectures

Purpose

These notes are primarily to aid me in the presentation of my lectures. I hope that you may find them useful in reviewing and understanding the lecture, and as a study-aid in preparing for the test and the exam.

Disclaimers

1. These notes are made up of the material I used to present the lectures. Some corrections have been made after the lecture, but the notes almost certainly still contain errors.
2. I may not follow these notes exactly in class.
3. You are responsible for what I say in class.
4. Reading these notes is not a substitute for attending lecture.

Lecture schedule, notes, and other handouts.

• Week 1: 28Feb-3March
  Notes for week (pdf): 9 slides/page , 4 slides/page
  • Tuesday: Course Overview, Moore's Law
  • Wednesday: Multiprocessing & Multithreading
  • Thursday: Multiprocessing Issues Hill: Processors should support simple memory-consistency models
  • Friday: Multiprocessor Programming & Hardware Support
• Week 2: 7-10Mar
  • Tuesday: Pthreads
  • Wednesday: Interconnection Networks
  • Thursday:Interconnection Networks (con't)
  • Friday: NO CLASS
• Week 3: 14-17Mar
  • Tuesday: Interconnection Networks (con't), Bitonic sort
  • Wednesday: Introduction to Simulation

    Code examples of event-based simulation

  • Thursday: Computer Simulation Architectural Simulation
  • Friday: NO CLASS
• Week 4: 21-24Mar
  • Tuesday: Simulation Tools for Computer Architecture
  • Wednesday: Snooping Caches: the MOESI Model (slides)
    Sweazey & Smith, "A class of compatible cache consistency protocols and their support by the IEEE Futurebus"
  • Thursday: NO CLASS
  • Friday: NO CLASS
• Week 5: 28-31Mar
  • Tuesday: Scalable memory systems (Slides: 4-up , 9-up )
    Wang, Baer & Levy, "Organization and performance of a two-level virtual-real cache hierarchy."
  • Wednesday: Scalable memory systems (Slides: 4-up , 9-up )
    "Patterson/Hennessy, Section 6.5."
  • Thursday: Atomic operations and critical sections
  • Friday: Extending hardware support for atomic operations
• Week 6: 5-8Apr
  Notes for week (pdf): 4 slides/page , 9 slides/page
  • Tuesday: Transactional memory
    Herlihy & Moss, "Transactional memory: architectural support for lock-free data structures"
  • Wednesday: Extending hardware support for atomic operations
    Rajwar & Goodman, "Speculative Lock Elision (SLE)"
  • Thursday: Transactional memory (Hardware)
  • Friday: Transactional memory (software)
• Week 7: 11-14Apr
  • Tuesday: Discussion with Dr. Mark Moir, Director, Scalable Synchronization Laboratory, Sun Microsystems
    Herlihy, Luchango, Moir, Shirer, "Software transactional memory for Dynamic-sized Data Structures"
  • Wednesday: Computer design issues & technology trends, Amdahl's Law, CPI equation, Locality, Parallelism (slides: 4-up , 9-up )
    
  "Patterson/Hennessy, Section 1.4."
  • Thursday: Review (slides: 4-up , 9-up )
  • Friday: NO CLASS (Christian Holiday)
• Week 8: 2-5May
  • Tuesday: NO CLASS, but tutorial in 279 (Evening Test: 6pm)
  • Wednesday: NO CLASS (University holiday)
  • Thursday: Microprogramming
    Mark Smotherman, "A brief history of microprogamming," (html)
  • Friday: Evaluating Performance
    James E. Smith, "Characterizing computer performance with a single number," CACM, 31(10), pp 1202-1206.
• Week 9: 9-12May
  • Tuesday: Addressing modes; control instructions; encoding
  • Wednesday: Compilers and architecture (Notes: 4-up, 9-up)
    W.A. Wulf, "Compilers & Computer Architecture," IEEE Computer, July 1981, pp. 41-47
  • Thursday: NO CLASS
  • Friday: Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP) and Branching (4-up, 9-up)
• Week 10: 15-19May
  • Tuesday: NO CLASS
  • Wednesday: Out-of-order execution & multiple instruction issue (Notes: 4-up, 9-up)
    R.M. Tomasulo, "An efficient algorithm for exploiting multiple arithmetic units," IBM Journal, January 1967, pp. 25-33.
  Thursday: NO CLASS
  • Friday: NO CLASS
• Week 11: 23-26May
  • Tuesday: NO CLASS
  • Wednesday: Speculation/Limits on ILP
  • Thursday: NO CLASS
  • Friday: EPIC architectures (Notes: 4-up, 9-up)
    Smotherman, Understanding EPIC Architectures and Implementations," ACM Southeast Conference, 2002
• Week 12: 30May-2Jun
  • Tuesday: NO CLASS
  • Wednesday: Cray Architectures: Cray-I (1978 paper), and Cray-X1 (6.7MB!)
  • Thursday: NO CLASS
  • Friday: Review (Notes: 4-up, 9-up)