CS665 - Computer Architecture

Spring 2016

Instructor: Professor Stephan Olariu
Office: E&CS 3202
Phone: 683-3915

Course Description: CS665 is a graduate core course in computer architecture. The main emphasis will be on identifying and understanding various quantitative aspects of the cost/performance issues involved in all stages of computer architecture design from functional organization to instruction set architecture, to memory hierarchy design, to pipelining and beyond.

Although most of the course gravitates around single-CPU architectures, aspects of multiprocessor architectures will also be discussed.

Material: Tentative topical coverage

• Chapter 1 - Fundamentals of computer design
• Appendix A - Instruction set principles
• Appendix C - Pipelining: basic and intermediate concepts
• Chapter 3 - Instruction-level parallelism
• Chapter 4 - Data-level parallelism
• Appendix B - Review of memory hierarchy
• Chapter 2 - Memory hierarchy design

Text: The textbook used in this class is Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson, Fifth Edition, Elsevier, 2012.

Prerequisite: CS270 - Introduction to Computer Architecture. Please note that CS665 is NOT open to students who have not had CS270 or equivalent.

Grading Scheme: Please note that all tests are in-class events; tests are closed-book, closed notes. However, the students are allowed a one-page summary sheet

• Intermediate Test 1: 30%
• Intermediate Test 2: 40%
• Intermediate Test 3: 30%

Office Hours: F 1:45pm - 3:00pm

Old Dominion University is committed to ensuring equal access to all qualified students with disabilities in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Office of Educational Accessibility (OEA) is the campus office that works with students who have disabilities to provide and/or arrange reasonable accommodations.

• If you experience a disability which will impact your ability to access any aspect of my class, please present me with an accommodation letter from OEA so that we can work together to ensure that appropriate accommodations are available to you.
• If you feel that you will experience barriers to your ability to learn and/or testing in my class but do not have an accommodation letter, please consider scheduling an appointment with OEA to determine if academic accommodations are necessary.

The Office of Educational Accessibility is located at 1021 Student Success Center and their phone number is (757)683-4655. Additional information is available at the OEA website: http://www.odu.edu/educationalaccessibility/

Back to Dr. Olariu's Home Page