Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

The curriculum introduces students to topics in computer architecture that are considered fundamental to an understanding of the digital systems underpinnings of computer systems.

COURSE DETAILS:

Prerequisites: Programming skills (C++ or C). Basic background at Unix/Linux. (https://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ashriram/Courses/CS431/assets/notebooks/essentialC.pdf) We assume familiarity with the Essential programming constructs listed in the pdf. https://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ashriram/Courses/CS431/assets/notebooks/unixProgrammingTools.pdf (We assume familiarity with basic unix shell programming tools) We assume linux environmental experience; typically obtained through CMPT 127, 135 or related course at SFU. All assignments and lab in this course are administered through the linux environment and shell.

https://www.cs.sfu.ca/~ashriram/Courses/CS431/assets/notebooks/unixProgrammingTools.pdf
(We assume familiarity with basic unix shell programming tools) 

Overview: This course should develop students' sense of what really happens when software runs — and that this question can be answered at several levels of abstraction, including the hardware architecture level, the assembly level and the C programming level. The core around which the course is built is C, assembly, and low-level data representation, but this is connected to higher levels (roughly how basic other programming langauges could could be implemented), lower levels (the general structure of a processor), and the role of the processor and its how it is implemented. This course provides an introduction to computer organization, systems programming and the hardware/software interface. Topics include instruction sets, computer arithmetic, datapath design, data formats, addressing modes, memory hierarchies including caches and virtual memory, and multicore architectures. Students learn assembly language programming and design a pipelined RISC V processor. The course is open to any undergraduate who has mastered the 120s material. #### RISC V This version of the course will study the core components in computer architecture through the lens of the RISC-V (V : Five) ISA. What is RISC V? It is a modern open source instruction set that enables students to learn both assembly-level programming and the digital design of a processor. **This course is a hands-on, programming-heavy course**. Expect to get down and get your hands dirty with C programming and hardware design. We will discuss the fundamental design and engineering trade-offs in computer architecture at every level. 

Course Offer Plan: **Lab:** There will be dedicated lab days. (required lab). Attendance is required and counts towards 2.5% of your overall grade.zoom/in-person (To be decided) **Biweekly quizzes** - There will be quiz every 2 weeks administer and graded online. These will be graded. **Instructor Hours (50 minute session) will be instructor hours. Synchronous 1-1 sessions that you can reserve (zoom). **Lecture (1hr 50minute)** will be in-person lecture day. I will be on presenting the major concepts fom the week's module. Further time will be spent on answering class-wide questions. **Videos** - All lecture content will be made available as videos 1 week prior. The expectation is that these videos are watched prior to the class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom 

Text books: Please try and obtain the eversions of these text books. Please continue to check our course outline for further information. Should this course be taught remotely due to pandemic, students must have access to a computer with internet access, allowing the use of a conferencing system such as Zoom or BB Collaborate Ultra. Some components of the course will require synchronous (real-time) participation during the scheduled lecture and/or exam times. Visual proctoring will most likely be required for midterms and exams. Midterms and Exams will be held in person.

Workload comments: The comments below are provided based on past student experience. It is to enable you to appropriately select the term in which you take 295. As the first introduction to systems, 295 is an intense course and requires 1) watching 3-4hrs of async. video /week 2) 2hrs of in-class activity 3) 1 hr of quizes/week 4) 1 hr of labs/week 5) 6 hrs / week for take-home programming assignments (avg. programmer.). Your learning outcomes in 295 are highly dependent on whether you are comfortable with the material, and C/C++ programming from 125 and 135. 295 is set up to make you a better programmer and this requires the student to invest the requisite time. As our grading distribution shows; all components are equally important. Hence, please take it in the term that you can dedicate the time.

Topics

• RISC-V
• Bits, Arrays, Pointers
• Number formats
• Caches
• Vectorization
• Processor Pipeline and Digital logic
• Parallelism
• Logical and arithmetic operations
• Floating point

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: