CS 441 - Computer Architecture

Announcements

• Final Exam and overall course grades are on NetRun.  This has been a fun semester, thank you!
• The final version of the project is due May 3 on Blackboard by midnight.  I'd like any code, plus comments or a short README explaining what it is, how it works, and what the results mean.
• The final exam will be 8am-noon Thursday, May 3 in our usual room Chapman 206.  (It'll be a normal-length exam, but the end time is extended for humanitarian reasons.  Recommended arrival time is at least 10:30am, but you can leave when you're finished.)
• Project 1 , the second project, will have presentations on April 24 & 26. 
  • Tuesday April 24: Jeremiah, Jesse, Jarye, Cameron, Dylan, Todd
  • Thursday April 26: Jacob, Jake, Tristan, Alex, Sam, William
• HW5 is on the orderly cyber distribution of root vegetables via a web UI, due on Blackboard  by midnight on Thursday, April 19.
• The midterm exam will be in class on Thursday, March 22 (after spring break).  Study by rereading the lecture notes below, and look at the 2016 midterm for an example of the question types (although that one was a take-home, so some of the questions expected you to do some research).  
  • Midterm Exam Grades are posted on NetRun's grading area.
• Proj0 final draft code and brief writeup is due Thursday, March 22 by midnight on Blackboard (log in first).
• Proj0 presentations will be 10 minutes long, in class this Tuesday & Thursday (March 6 & 8).  Please be prepared, and bring any converters you'll need to emit HDMI.
• HW4 on CUDA performance optimization is due Tuesday, February 27 by midnight on NetRun.
• Proj0 rough drafts are due Thursday, February 22 by midnight on Blackboard (log in  first).
• HW3 on multicore and SIMD performance optimization is due Tuesday, February 20 by midnight on NetRun.
• Proj0 topics are due Thursday, February 15 in class.
• HW2 on AVX SIMD is on NetRun, and due Tuesday, February 6 by midnight.  (If you don't see a CS 441 on your NetRun, email me!)
• HW1 CPU circuit design is due Thursday, January 25 by midnight.
• HW0 on basic logic and assembly is due Tuesday, January 23 by midnight
• Help me match the course to your interests by rating possible course topics here. 

Lecture Notes

• 04/19: Quantum Computer Architecture
• 04/17: Parallel Data Structures & Algorithms in Scientific Software
• 04/12: Project work session (no class due to NCCDC)
• 04/10: Message Passing Interface (MPI)
• 04/05: Web Frameworks: Wurst
• 04/03: Network Performance Modeling
• 03/29: Accessing Web Services from JavaScript
• 03/27: Networking Overview: The Full Web Stack
• 03/20: Course Review for Midterm Exam  (fillable document)
• 03/01: FPGA and ASIC performance
• 02/27: Comparing CUDA and multicore
• 02/22: Optimizing CUDA performance using __shared__ memory
• 02/20: Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) programming with CUDA
• 02/15: Designing High-Performance Parallel Code
• 02/13: Cache and Multicore Cache Coherence
• 02/08: Multicore via OpenMP or C++11 threads
• 02/06: SIMD Within A Register (SWAR)
• 02/01: SIMD : SSE  128-bit and AVX 256-bit
• 01/30: Out of Order Execution and Branch Prediction  (Agner Fog's excellent Microarchitecture book)
• 01/25: Superscalar CPUs
• 01/23: Pipelining and operand forwarding
• 01/18: Designing a CPU as a Circuit
• 01/16: Power Physics, and Semiconductors