CS152: Computer Systems Architecture

2022 Winter

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware"
-- Alan Kay

Overview

In this course, we will cover how modern processors are designed to achieve high performance under which restrictions, and actually get hands-on experience with hardware design using a sequence of gently guided labs. You will get to see your ideas actually improve performance on real metal!
We will use RISC-V, a modern, real-world, and open-source ISA as our learnig tool.

This class will be taught mostly in-person, but parts of it may be offered over live Zoom!

Lecturer: Sang-Woo Jun
Time:

• Lecture: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM (DBH 1422)
• Discussion: Fridays, 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM (PSCB 140)

Topics Covered

• Instruction sets and abstraction
• Computer Arithmetic
• Pipelining and Hazards
• Memory Hierarchy
• Introduction to modern topics

Announcements

Material

• 2022-01-04: Lecture 1 - Introduction [slides] [video(RAW)]
• 2022-01-06: Lecture 1.5: Moore's Law [slides] [video(RAW)]
• 2022-01-06: Lecture 2: HW-SW Interface [slides]
• 2022-01-11: Lecture 3: RISC-V Assembly [slides] [video(RAW)]
• 2022-01-13: Lecture 4: RISC-V ISA encoding, x86 History [video(RAW)]
• 2022-01-18: Lecture 5: RISC-V assembly conventions, circuits recap [slides] [video(RAW)]
• 2022-01-20: Lecture 6: Circuits recap [video(RAW)]
• 2022-01-25: Lecture 7: Pipelining [slides] [video(RAW)]
• 2022-01-27: Lecture 8: Pipelining the processor [video(RAW)]
• 2022-02-01: Lecture 9: Pipelining the processor - Hazards [video(RAW)]
• 2022-02-03: Lecture 10: Pipelining the processor - Branch prediction, Hands-on [slides] [video(RAW)]
• 2022-02-08: Lecture 11: Bluespec, Pipelining hands-on [slides] [video(RAW)]
• 2022-02-10: Lecture 12: Pipelining hands-on, loose topics [slides] [video(RAW)]
• 2022-02-15: Lecture 13: Loose topics, caches [slides] [video(RAW)]
• 2022-02-17: Lecture 14: Caches continued [video(RAW)]
• 2022-02-22: Lecture 15: Operating system support [slides] [video(RAW)]
• 2022-02-24: Lecture 16: Virtual memory [slides] [video(RAW)]
• 2022-03-01: Lecture 17: Virtual memory2 [video(RAW)]
• 2022-03-03: Lecture 18: Parallelism [slides] [video(RAW)]
• 2022-03-08: Lecture 19: SIMD, GPUs [slides] [video(RAW)]
• 2022-03-10: Lecture 20: System bus, Storage [slides] [video(RAW)]

Labs

1. RISC-V Assembly lab [link]
2. Processor pipelining Virtualbox VM [link]
3. Cache exploration [link]

Grading

• Three Labs: 60 %
• Final: 40 %

Book

This class does not have a mandatory book.
However, it may be helpful to consult Computer Organization and Design RISC-V Edition: The Hardware Software Interface (by David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy).

Interesting Materials

• The Digital Antiquarian, "Doing Windows" Series [link]: A fascinating history of how Microsoft Windows became what others couldn't, and how innovations in Intel 80386 helped made it happen.
• RISC-V ISA reference [link]
• Scott Meyers: Cpu Caches and Why You Care [link]: Some less obvious but serious effects of memory access patterns on performance
• Alessandro Levi: Is This the Most Complex Machine in the World? [link]: Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machine which tries to push the limits of moore's law
• evilmonkeyzdesignz: {Taking apart an AMD chip package} [link]
• Colin Scott: Numbers every programmer should know by year [link]
• Performance Matters: AVX-512 Mask Registers, Again [link]