Course objective:

Main goal of the course is that the student understands all the major concepts used in modern microprocessors by the end of the semester.The course will cover the different forms of parallelism found in applications (instruction-level, data-level, thread-level, gate-level) and how these can be exploited with various architectural features. It will cover pipelining, superscalar, speculative and out-of-order execution, vector machines, VLIW machines, multithreading, graphics processing units, and parallel microprocessors. Final goal is to show how the software interacts with the hardware to provide performance and how trends in technology, application and economics have driven and drive continuing changes in the field.


Main lectures topics:

1. Review of basic computer architecture: the RISC approach and pipelining, the memory hierarchy
2. Basic performance evaluation metrics of computer architectures
3. Techniques for performance optimization: processor and memory
4. Instruction level parallelism: static and dynamic scheduling;  superscalar architectures: principles and problems; VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) architectures, examples of architecture families
5. Thread-level parallelism: architetctures 
6. Multiprocessors and multicore systems: taxonomy, topologies, communication management, memory management, cache coherency protocols, example of architectures
7. Stream processors and vector processors; Graphic Processors, GP-GPUs

PRE-REQUIREMENTS:
Basic concepts of logic design and computer architectures

The final examination consists of a WRITTEN EXAM.

Additional information in slides and papers available through the course website in BeeP.