CS 3443: Computer Systems (Fall 2008)

Announcements:

• We will mainly use the Desire2Learn system for course materials this semester. Please login the Online Classroom and Community for more information, https://oc.okstate.edu/. Tutorial on using Desire2Learn is available here.
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Fall 2008 Syllabus

Instructor:

Dr. X. Li
Office: 223 MSCS, 405-744-2338
Office Hours: W 4pm-6pm
Email: xiaolin at cs
URL: http://www.cs.okstate.edu/~xiaolin

Teaching Assistant:

Xin Yang
Office: 226 MSCS,
Office Hours: T 2:30pm-4:30pm
Email: xiny at cs
 

Class Meeting Time and Place:

Time: MWF 10:30am-11:20am
Place: Agriculture Hall 201

Course Objective and Description:

This course will focus on fundamental principles of computer organization & architecture, and functional and register level description of computer systems and structures. It will cover instruction set, addressing techniques, linkage, assembly language, computer arithmetic, datapath and control, pipelining, memory hierarchy, and input/output operations.

Prerequisite:

• CS 2113 (Computer Science I) and some basic C/Unix knowledge.

Required Textbook: 

Computer Organization & Design, the Hardware/Software Interface, 3rd Edition, Patterson and Hennessy, Morgan Kaufman, 2004, ISBN: 1558606041.

Other References: 

• A Verilog HDL Primer, Third Edition (Hardcover), by J. Bhasker, Wiley-IEEE
• Embedded System Design: A Unified Hardware/Software Introduction, Frank Vahid and Tony Givargis, Wiley, 2002.
• Designing Embedded Hardware, John Catsoulis, O'Reilly, 2nd Edition, 2005.

Course Homepage:

    http://www.cs.okstate.edu/~xiaolin/teaching/cs3443

Course Outline (tentative):

1. Introduction
2. Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)
• Bridge between software and the processor (CPU)
• Accumulator
• Stack
• General purpose registers
• Load/store
3. Data Representation
• Binary numbers
• Conversion to/from binary, octal, hexadecimal
• Floating point representation
4. MIPS ISA
• Assembler
• Pseudo instructions
• System calls
• Procedure calls
• SPIM, other ISAs
• (Midterm I)
5. Performance Evaluation
6. Basics of Logic Design
• Boolean functions
• Logic gates
• Multiplexers
• Adder
• Introduction to Verilog
• Arithmetic logic unit (ALU)
7. Designing a Processor: datapath and control
• Single cycle datapath
• Single cycle control
• Multicycle datapath implementation
• (Midterm II)
8. Pipelining
• Introduction to pipelining
• A pipelined datapath
• Pipelined control
• Data hazards and branch hazards
9. Memory Hierarchy
• Cache
• Virtual memory
10. InputOutput
11. Multiprocessor
12. Final Exam

Grading Policies:

OSU Syllabus Attachment, Fall 2008

Interesting Links

• Textbook Home Page
• SPIM Tutorial (spim, spimwin)
• SPIM Home Page
• Verilog Simulators
• VHDL Simulators: VHDL Simili, ActiveHDL
• WWW Collection of Computer Architecture 
• CPU Info Center
• Online classic textbooks: Computer structures: readings and examples  by C. Gordon Bell and Allen Newell. New York, McGraw-Hill [c1971] , 2nd edition Computer structures: principles and examples by Siewiorek, D., C. G. Bell, and A. Newell, New York, McGraw-Hill [c1982]
• comp.arch google group
• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH)
• IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA)