CS250P: Computer Systems Architecture

2022 Fall

"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. We will cover the topics related to: instruction set design; processor micro-architecture and pipelining; cache and virtual memory organizations; protection and sharing; I/O and interrupts; in-order and out-of-order superscalar architectures; memory models and synchronization; embedded systems; and parallel computers.

Since this course is a professional masters course, we will focus a bit more on pragmatic topics including architectural knowledge for performance engineering, and industry trends and outlook.

Lecturer: Sang-Woo Jun
Lectures: MW 3:30PM - 4:50PM @ ICS 174
Discussion: Fri 3PM @ ICS 174
Piazza: Link provided in Canvas

Mid-terms: TBD

Schedule And Material

Date	Title
2023-10-02	Lecture 1: Introduction, Moore's Law Slides - Introduction Slides - Moore's Law
2023-10-04	Lecture 2: Hardware-Software Interface Slides - TBA Slides - HW-SW Interface Slides - RISC-V and x86 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. LGR, Installing MS-DOS on an AMD Ryzen Gaming PC [link]: Testament to the strict backwards-compatibility of x86!
2023-10-09	Lecture 3: ISA Encoding and Complexity Slides - ISA Encoding Swanson Technologies, The Art of Picking Intel Registers [link]: A bit more detail into how no x86 register is quite "general-purpose"
2023-10-11	Lecture 4: Digital Circuits Why and How Slides - Circuits evilmonkeyzdesignz: {Taking apart an AMD chip package} [link]: What does a CPU package actually look like inside? Kim, Nam Sung, et al., "Leakage Current: Moore's Law Meets Static Power," Computer 12 (2003)
2023-10-16	Lecture 4: Processor Design Constraints Slides - Constraints video
2023-10-18	Lecture 5: Pipelining Slides
2023-10-23	Lecture 5.5: Fast and Correct Pipelining Slides video - Hazards video - Branch Prediction
2022-10-25	Lecture 6: Explicit Parallelism Slides An interesting example of looking at CPU die photos (among others) and reasoning about functionality [AVX Mask Registers, Again] [Discussion at HackerNews]
2023-11-01	Lecture 7: Caches and the memory system Slides video from 2022 Scott Meyers video on CPU caches and optimizing software: Scott Meyers: Cpu Caches and Why You Care (2014) HARIZOPOULOS, STRAVOS, et. al., Improving Instruction Cache Performance in OLTP Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know
2023-11-13	Lecture 8: Architectural support for the Operating System Slides The 640K memory limit of MS-DOS: Evolution of backwards-compatible larger memory support with Intel CPUs
2023-11-20	Lecture 9: Virtual Memory Slides
2023-11-27	Lecture 10: Multiprocessing Slides (Slightly) asymmetrical multiprocessing with ARM big.LITTLE architecture: link Understanding memory models is important for fast kernels (email from Linus Torvalds) link
2023-12-01	Lecture 13: Datacenter architecture Slides
2023-12-03	Lecture 11: GPU Introduction Slides video

Homework

• Homework 1: Take-home quiz, most likely
• Homework 2: Take-home quiz, most likely

Grading

Homework: 50%, midterm exam: 25%, final exam: 25% of your grade (all grades curved).
Late homework policy: You can submit late homework 5 days after the deadline for 60% of your grade.

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).

Exam resources

• TBD