CPSC 418: Information
Go to CpSc 418 home page
Contents:
[
Course Outline |
Course Reading List |
Instructor |
Invited Lecture Series |
Lectures |
Marking |
Newsgroup |
T.A. |
Text Book |
]
- Xiushan Feng
- Office: CICSR 245
- Email: xsfeng@cs.ubc.ca
- Phone: 822-5307
- Office Hours: TBA
- Tuesdays & Thursdays 8:30-10:00 AM
- Room: CICSR 208
Papers
A goal of this course is to teach how to read papers about computer
architecture. In addition to the readings
for the course, there will be two assignments of the form ``find a
paper about computer architecture, read it, and write a 2-5 page
summary.''
Here are some suggestions of where to find papers.
These summaries will be graded for both content and clarity.
As scientists and engineers, you must be able to communicate effectively.
Marks will be taken off for poor writing style and grammatical errors that
impede understanding.
Spell check everything that you type!
| First paper due: | March 6, 2001 |
| Second paper due: | April 12, 2001 |
Quizzes
To get the most out of this cours,
it is essential that you read the papers before class.
Lectures will explore, expand upon, and critique the content of the papers.
The ability to read is a pre-requisite for this course;
I won't spend lecture time reading the papers to you.
I realize that some of you prefer a tangible incentive for preparing for class.
Thus, there will be some pop-quizzes.
Basically, each question will have one question: ``Did you read the paper?''.
To make this question easier to answer accurately, I will ask a few very
simple questions about the paper (or perhaps papers of the previous week).
If you've read the paper, the quiz will be trivial.
I'll take your best five scores out of the six quizzes.
This course will build upon the material of CpSc 318 to examine current
issues in computer architecture.
Traditionally, architecture courses cover topics in the order of
instruction sets, memory, and I/O.
This means that instruction sets get too much attention and I/O gets neglected.
As a remedy, I'm going to teach this course in the opposite order.
For each topic, I'll start with papers from the book and include some
papers on more recent developments as well.
The first half of the semester will focus on I/O. The main emphasis will
be on disks and disk arrays. We will also examine networks. To put I/O
issues in context, we'll examine some of the key physical issues in I/O
systems such as properties of electrical signals, and optical fibers.
The second half of the semester will begin with a section on memory hierarchy.
I will assume that students are familiar with caching, but will give a lecture
or two of review anyway.
The focus will be on caching techniques, especially for workloads with
large data sets and for shared-memory multiprocessors.
These are currently issues for server machines and are likely to become
increasingly important for desktop workstations and personal computers
in the next few years.
The final three weeks of the semester will look at instruction level
parallelism. Topics covered will include instruction scheduling,
out-of-order execution, branch prediction, and speculative execution.
- Read the class newsgroup!
should be your primary resource for questions about lectures,
assignments, etc.
I will read the group often and respond to questions there.
Also, if you have information (or the answer) to a question posted,
feel free to post a response.
I will post corrections or clarifications if needed.
I consider constructive participation in in the newgroup to be
reasonable grounds for extra-credit -- I can only observer your
posting, not your reading.
- You are welcome to stop by my office any time, but I may
not be there or may be busy. Send email to check if I'm
available. The purpose of office hours is to provide you with
a time when I guarantee that I will be in my office and CS418
will be my top priority. If there is any reason that I absolutely
cannot be available at office hours, I will announce it in class
that day and post to the newsgroup.
The T.A.s will handle
questions regarding homework marks, and will also be available
during office hours for technical questions.
- All homeworks, handouts, solutions, etc will be installed
on the CS418 web pages:
When something new is installed on the Web, an announcement will be
posted to the newsgroup.
- Many chip and computer manufacturers now have web pages. A
lot of it is fluff, but hard information can sometimes be found.
A few sites have already been linked
into the course web pages; more will be added.
- The newsgroup comp.arch is an
excellent source of
information on computer architecture. The comp.sys.*
hierarchy is for specific machines, such as
comp.sys.powerpc.tech for
the IBM/Motorola/Apple PowerPC.
I strongly encourage you to give me feedback on what you like and don't
like about the course, what you find easy or difficult, what homework
problems you learned from and which ones you found non-helpful.
I also encourage feedback on the papers that I've assigned -- are
they too easy, too difficulty, overlap too much with material from
CpSc 318, etc.
I encourage discussions about the concepts in the course and the homework.
However, each student must do their solution individually.
Don't tell your friend something about a homework assignment that
you know shouldn't be posted to the course newsgroup.
If you discuss the homework with other members of the class and it is
likely that you will work out solutions with similar approaches as a
result, state this in your solution. Be specific -- name the people
that you discussed the problem with and the aspects of the solution that
you figured out together.
As I stated above, I encourage discussions about the concepts.
Proper academic conduct requires that you
give credit when you receive
an idea from someone else.
I basically trust you all not to cheat, and I expect cheating
not to be a problem. However, suspected cheating cases will
be referred promptly to the University for appropriate disciplinary
action.
I've adopted much of the material for these pages from
Alan Hu's pages from
last year's instance of this course.
Copyright 2001 Mark R. Greenstreet
mrg@cs.ubc.ca
Last Modified: January 1, 2001