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, multicore and parallel homogeneous and heterogeneous architectures. 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.

Expected learning outcomes

DdD 1 (Knowledge and understanding): Students will learn how to:

• Understand and analyze the most advanced microprocessors and computer architectures
• Evaluate and compare the performance of computer architectures
• Understand the most advanced techniques to optimize the memory hierarchy
• Manage the parallelism at instruction-level, thread-level, multi-processor level
• Understand the mechanisms of streaming and vector processing widely used in modern GP-GPUs.

DdD 2 (Applying knowledge and understanding): Given specific problems and project cases, students will be capable to:

• Analyze and compare specific architectural choices of a computer system
• Evaluate the performance of computer architectures by applying appropriate metrics
• Exploit the parallelism at several levels from instructions to threads to cores to vectors

DdD 3 (Making judgements): Given specific problems and project cases, students will be capable to analyze the performance goals and compare autonomously different computer architecture choices in terms of performance metrics

DdD4 (Communication skills) : Students will learn how to present in a technical text and how to discuss in front of their colleagues the benefits and drawbacks of advanced computer architecture techniques.

DdD 5 (Learning skills): Students will be capable to learn autonomously the most advanced research techniques related to state-of-the-art microprocessor and parallel computer architectures

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, heterogeneous architectures

Basic concepts of logic design and computer architectures

The final examination consists of a WRITTEN EXAM consisting of:

- The solution of some design problems based on the practical application of the course concepts and techniques  -- Expected learning outcomes 1,2, 3, 5

- Open answers to some questions on the course concepts and techniques - Expected learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Optionally, students can ask to be assigned to a design project to analyze and present advanced research techniques or to develop some innovative solutions or some empirical experiments by using open-source design tools. Expected learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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