2K6 CS 804 : ADVANCED COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

Module I (15 hours)
Fundamentals – task of a computer designer – trends in technology usage and cost – performance measurement – quantitative principles of computer design – instruction set architectures – classification – addressing and operations – encoding an instruction set – role of compilers – case study – the DLX architecture – pipelining – pipeline for DLX – pipeline hazards – data and control hazards – implementation difficulties – pipelining with multi-cycle operations
Module II (12 hours)
Instruction level parallelism – concepts and challenges – dynamic scheduling – dynamic hardware prediction – multiple issue of instructions – compiler and hardware support for ILP – vector processing – vector architecture – vector length and stride – compiler vectorization – enhancing vector performance
Module III (13 hours)
Memory hierarchy design – reducing cache misses and miss penalty, reducing hit time – main memory – virtual memory and its protection – case study – protection in the Intel Pentium – crosscutting issues – I/O systems – performance measures – reliability and availability – designing an I/O system – case study – Unix file system performance
Module IV (12 hours)
Interconnection networks – simple networks – connecting more than two computers – practical issues – multiprocessors – introduction – application domains – centralized-shared memory and distributed-shared memory architectures – synchronization – models of memory consistency

Text book
Hennesy J.L. & Pattersen D.A., Computer Architecture: A Quantitative approach, 2/e, Harcourt Asia Pte Ltd. (Morgan Kaufman)
Reference books
1. Pattersen D.A. & Hennesy J.L., Computer Organisation and Design: The Hardware/ Software Inter face, 2/e, Harcourt Asia Pte Ltd (Morgan Kaufman)
2. Hwang K., Advanced Computer Architecture: Parallelism, Scalability and Programmability, McGraw Hill
3. Hwang & Briggs, Computer Architecture and Parallel Processing. McGrawHill