CS441 - Architecture - 2009

Announcements

• Overall course grades, final exam grades, and project 2 comments are posted on NetRun under your Blackboard/UA/@alaska.edu username (like "oslawlor"). (For some reason, UAOnline doesn't recognize me as the instructor, so I can't post 441 grades there yet...)
• The final exam will be 8am Thursday. See you then!
• PROJ2 topics will be due in class on Tuesday, December 8; the final code and writeup will be due at midnight Friday, December 18 on Blackboard.
• HW4 (OpenMP, SSE, MPI) was due at midnight on Tuesday, November 24 on Blackboard.
• HW3 (floats, performance) was posted on NetRun (using your new @alaska.edu login, see below), and was due at midnight on Tuesday, November 3.
• Midterm and overall course grades are posted on NetRun under your Blackboard/UA/@alaska.edu username (like "oslawlor", not "fsosl"). You may need to reset your NetRun password for this account name.
• The midterm exam was held in class on Tuesday, October 20. 
• Project 1 presentations will be in class October 13 & 15 according to this schedule:
  

• Tuesday, October 13	Thursday, October 15
  Bob: Cell Communication Adam: Cell Architecture Russell: Intel Core i7 vs P4 and Core2 Ruth: Quantum Factorization Natasa: Human-Embedded Computing Wayne: 64-bit History	James: TRIPS CPU Jeff: x86 SSE Instructions Robert: Multicore History Kevin: PowerPC History Tamsen: Quantum Computing Beau: MRAM

• Rules for the presentations:
• Speakers: Relax, slow down, and show us your pretty pictures.  We like you.  Be sure to tell us your name.
• Listeners: While listening, fill out one comment section per speaker.  Comment sheets are in the manila envelope in the bottom of the lectern; just put the filled-out sheets back there when done.
  
• I'm going to be travelling, so I hereby appoint as dictator the person in the room with the highest-alphabetical last name (e.g., a hypothetical Mrs. Zzerkwa would always be dictator).  The dictator's only function is to make sure speakers take no more than 15 minutes each, one 3-minute break occurs, and the comment sheets are handed out and collected. 
  
• If the projector breaks down, or won't talk to your laptop, or there's some other minor technical malfunction, your presentation SHOULD STILL GO ON.  Wave your arms or use a sharpened stick to draw in the dirt of the parking lot if necessary.
  
• If you'd like to postpone your presentation day, please email me!
  
• Project 1 lecture notes were due Thursday, October 8 on Blackboard.
• HW2, on CPU instruction set design, was due at midnight on Thursday, September 17 on Blackboard.
• HW1, on prerequisites, was handed out and collected in class.
• Dr. Lawlor was be travelling the first day of class (Thursday, September 3) to attend IEEE Cluster 2009.  So our first class was on Tuesday, September 8.  In the meantime, read the lecture notes (below), or watch the YouTube teaser lecture.
  

Links

• NetRun lets you run code right from your web browser. Anybody with a UAF email address can get a password online. See NetRun Help.
  
• Lecture Notes:
  • 12_10_review, Course Review for Final Exam modified 2009-12-10
  • 12_03_GPGPU, General-Purpose Graphics Processor Unit (GPGPU) Computing modified 2009-12-03
  • 12_01_parallel_cmp, Comparing Levels of Parallel Execution modified 2009-12-02
  • 11_24_GPU, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Computing modified 2009-11-24
  • 11_19_mandelbrot_compare, Comparative Parallel Computing: Mandelbrot modified 2009-11-19
  • 11_17_netperf, Network Performance Implications: Message Combining modified 2009-11-17
  • 11_10_MPI, Message Passing Interface: MPI modified 2009-11-09
  • 11_05_shared_memory, Shared Memory Performance Pitfalls modified 2009-11-05
  • 11_02_openMP, OpenMP modified 2009-11-03
  • 10_29_threads, Multithreaded Parallelism modified 2009-11-02
  • 10_27_more_sse, More SSE, SSE vs non-x86 SIMD modified 2009-10-27
  • 10_22_sse, Streaming SIMD Extensions: SSE modified 2009-10-30
  • 10_08_fpu, Floating-Point Circuitry & Interface modified 2009-10-08
  • 10_06_storage, Storage Circuitry modified 2009-10-06
  • 10_01_storage, Cache & the Memory Hierarchy in Practice modified 2009-09-30
  • 09_29_timing, Using Timing data to Understand CPU Architecture modified 2009-09-29
  • 09_24_pipeline++, Pipelining, Dependencies, and Superscalar Execution modified 2009-09-24
  • 09_22_tkgate, Circuit-Level CPU Simulation with TkGate modified 2009-09-22
  • 09_17_memory, Memory Access in Machine Code modified 2009-09-17
  • 09_15_arguments, Encoding Arguments in Machine Code modified 2009-09-15
  • 09_10_risc_vs_cisc, Analog vs Digital Circuits; RISC vs CISC Instruction Encoding modified 2009-09-10
  • 09_04_history, A Brief History of Computing, starting in 150 BC modified 2009-08-27
• Course syllabus includes dates to remember, the grading policy, and a course outline.

Documentation

• If you haven't written x86 assembly, read my NASM x86 cheat sheet or the NASM Docs, in particular the x86 Instruction List. The CS 301 site is useful too, especially the 301 lecture notes.
  

O. Lawlor, lawlor@alaska.edu
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