King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals
College of Computer Sciences and Engineering
Computer Engineering Department
COE 501 Computer Architecture
Course Syllabus

• Instructor: Professor Mayez Al-Mouhamed (Email: mayez@kfupm.sa.edu)
• Office: COE Office 22-400-3 (Tel. 2934) and DAD office 68-375 (Tel. 8714),
• Office hours: from 2-3 pm Thursday and by appointment (call at 2934).
• Text Book and references:
  • Computer architecture: a quantitative approach, Hennessy and Patterson, Third edition, Morgan Kaufnam Publishers, Inc.
  • Selected papers from IEEE T.C., IEEE T.P.D.S., etc. in addition to the following books:
    • D.E. Culler and J.P. Singh, Parallel Computer Architecture: A Hardware/Software Approach, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1999, ISBN 1-55860-343-3.
    • Computer Architecture and Parallel Processing, K. Hwang and F. Briggs, Mc-Graw-Hill.
    • Readings in Computer Architecture, Mark Hill (Editor), Norman Jouppi (Editor), Gurindar Sohi (Editor), Morgan Kaufmann Publishing Co., Menlo Park, CA. 1999
    • Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware / Software Interface", Patterson and Hennessy, Morgan-Kaufmann, 1998.
    • M.J. Quinn, Parallel Programming in C with MPI and OpenMP, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, 2004, ISBN 0-07-282256-2.
    • P.S. Pacheco, Parallel Programming with MPI, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1997, ISBN 1-55860-339-5.
    • J.M. May, Parallel I/O for High Performance Computing, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 2001, ISBN 1-55860-664-5.
    • K. Hwang and Z. Xu, Scalable Parallel Computing: Technology, Architecture, Programming, McGraw-Hill, 1998, ISBN 0070317984.
    • A.E. Koniges (ed), Industrial Strength Parallel Computing, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 2000, ISBN 1-55860-540-1.
    • G.R. Andrews, Multithreaded, Parallel, and Distributed Programming,Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass., 2000, ISBN 0-201-35752-6.
    • G.F. Pfister, In Search of Clusters, 2nd Edition, PTR Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1998, ISBN 0-13-899709-8.
    • Kai Hwang, Advanced Computer Architecture - Parallelism, Scalability, Programmability, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, 1993, ISBN 0-07-031622-8.
• Grading Policy:  Exam 1: 20/100 (Wednesday 14 February 2018), Exam 2: 20/100 (Wednesday 28 March 2018), Course project: 20/100, Homework: 10/100, and Final Exam: 30/100 (scheduled by the registrar).

• Attendance of classes and exams: attendance is required by all students. Excuse for official authorized excuse for missing classes and exams must be issued by the KFUPM Student Affairs and be presented to the instructor no later than one week following the absence. Part-timers are recommended to have a medical file at the KFUPM clinic so that they can obtain medical excuse from the KFUPM clinic in the case of sickness. The medical excuse from KFUPM clinic is a requirement for obtaining an official authorized excuse from KFUPM Student Affairs to be handed to the instructor within one week time from the absence. Unexcused absences lead to a ``DEN'' grade.

Course Description: Classification of computer systems, architectural developments, computer performance. Linear and nonlinear pipeline design, instruction and arithmetic pipeline, superscalar. Memory hierarchy, cache and virtual memories, cache coherence, memory system performance. Parallel architectures, performance measures, SIMD and MIMD architectures. Interconnection networks.
Pre-requisite: graduate standing.

Course Outline:

1. Introduction (5 lectures)
   Classification of computer systems, architectural developments, cost and trends, computer performance, measuring CPU time, CPI, MIPS, FLOPS, and computer benchmark suites, Examples of ISA. (Chapter 1 and 2).

 

1. Pipelining (15 lectures)
   ILP, instruction pipelining, hazards, dynamic branch prediction, Tomasulo dynamic execution, speculative execution and limitation, multiple issue superscalar processors, and examples. Software approaches to ILP, static branch prediction, VlIW versus dynamic execution, compiler support for ILP, unrolling, software pipelining, dependence analysis, and examples. (Chapters 3 and 4)

2. Memory system (12 lectures)
   Memory hierarchy, cache memory organization, cache algorithms, performance of memory, improving memory performance, virtual memories, and examples. (Chapters 5)

3. Parallel architectures (10 lectures)
   Classification of parallel computers, SIMD architectures, MIMD shared-memory and distributed-memory architectures, programming, performance, SPMD, and synchronization and barriers. Coherence protocols. Interconnection networks, examples, and performance. (Chapters 6 and 8)

4. Miscellaneous (midterm and presentations) (3 lectures)