CS665 - Computer Architecture

Fall 2020

Instructor: Professor Stephan Olariu

Course Description:
Please note that in Fall 2020 CS665 will be offered online
CS665 is a graduate core course in computer architecture. The main emphasis will be on identifying various quantitative aspects of computer design and on understanding and resolving a number of 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 Quantitative Design and Analysis
• Appendix A - Instruction Set Principles
• Appendix C - Pipelining: Basic and Intermediate Concepts
• Chapter 3 - Instruction-Level Parallelism and its Exploitation
• Chapter 4 - Data-Level Parallelism in Vector, SIMD, and GPU Architectures
• 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, 6-th Edition, Elsevier, 2019. Please note that some of the material in the 5-th edition of the textboo remains relevant. However, most of the material on pipelining is outdated..

Prerequisite: CS270 - Introduction to Computer Architecture or equivalent. Beware that students lacking the prerequisite tend not to do well in CS665.

Grading Scheme: My intention is to have the three tests administered at designated ODU testing centers around the country. However, due to the level of Covid-19 activity in various areas, other testing modalities may be identified, as needed.

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

Office Hours: Mondays, 2:00pm - 3:00pm. To be held online via Zoom sessions.

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