EC462 Advanced Computer Architecture

Catalog Data & Credits (Recitation-Lab-Total)

EC462 Advanced Computer Architecture (3-0-3): This course provides students an in-depth look at the design of modern computers beginning with a review of elementary computer architecture and quickly moving into an examination of modern methods of high-speed performance from microprocessors. The course covers topics essential to modern superscalar processor design: review of pipelined processor design and advanced hierarchical memory design; additional topics including advanced branch prediction, register renaming, out-of-order execution and advanced speculation. This course also provides a coverage of memory and storage technologies, and also gets into parallel processing, vector machines, GPUs, CUDA programming, thread-level parallelism, and even warehouse/cloud computing. The last few weeks are dedicated to performing an analysis of research papers in the advanced computer architecture community.

Pre-requisites

Course Objectives

1. Demonstrate an ability to understand and analyze complex advanced computer architecture techniques
2. Able to program and understand advanced computer architecture systems including superscalar processor simulators and graphics processing engines
3. Read and present your findings of advanced computer architecture conference papers
4. Work in a team setting to reproduce an advanced computer architecture conference paper