Advanced Computer Architectures

Course guarantor:

Lecturer:

Tutor:

Supervisor:

Department of Computer Science

Synopsis:

This course extends knowledge of modern computer architecture. Mainly the architecture of nowadays processors utilizing instruction and/or thread level parallelism and advanced pipelining is in the center of our attention. A special emphasis will be devoted to the implementation of parallelism in hardware, parallel program design, and advanced instruction scheduling and execution.

Requirements:

Syllabus of lectures:

1. Introduction

(Control flow computers and Data flow computers. Flynn's taxonomy. Parallel processing. Amdahl's and Gustavson's law. Metrics.)

2. From scalar processors to superscalar processors - basic organization of superscalar processor

(Static, dynamic and hybrid scheduling of the instruction flow)

3. Superscalar techniques I - Register data flow

(Register renaming - Tomasulo's algorithm. Data speculation. Precise exception support.)

4. Superscalar techniques II - Instruction flow, speculation

(Prediction and Predictors, Branch misprediction recovery)

5. Superscalar techniques III - Memory data flow; VLIW and EPIC

(Load bypassing and Load forwarding. Load speculation. Data parallelism, SIMD and vector instructions in ISA; Loop-unrolling and software pipelining.)

6. Memory subsystem

(Non-blocking cache, Victim cache, Virtual memory and cache)

7. Multiprocessor systems and Memory coherence

(Distributed memory systems and Shared memory systems. Symmetric multiprocessor systems (SMP). Coherence in SMP)

8. Multiprocessor systems and Memory consistency

(Rules for memory operations, Sequential consistency and other consistency models.)

9. Programming of parallel systems I - Data consistency on multiprocessor system

(Parallel computing concepts, Programming issues, Parallel programming paradigms, Message Passing Interface and Open Multi-Processing)

10. Programming of parallel systems II

(Synchronization)

11. I/O subsytem

(PCIe, HyperTransport, QuickPathInterconnect)

12. MPP and clusters, interconnection networks

13. Architecture perspectives

Syllabus of tutorials:

1.Introduction, semester project assignment

2.Instruction set and compilation

3.Pipelined processor simulator

4.Optimization algorithms for pipelined processor

5.Superscalar processor simulator

6.Intro of semester projects presentation

7.-11. Semester projects processing

12.-14. Semester projects presentation and defense

Study Objective:

The course increases the knowledge in the field of modern computer architecture.

Study materials:

1. Hennesy, J. L., Patterson, D. A.: Computer Architecture : A Quantitative Approach, Third Edition, San Francisco, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., 2002

2. Shen, J.P., Lipasti, M.H.: Modern Processor Design : Fundamentals of Superscalar Processors, First Edition, New York, McGraw-Hill Inc., 2004

3. Grama A., Gupta, A. et al.: Introduction to Parallel Computing, Second Edition, Addison Wesley, 2003

Note:

Further information:

https://cw.fel.cvut.cz/wiki/courses/a4m36pap

No time-table has been prepared for this course

The course is a part of the following study plans: