This is the second level course in Computer Architecture. Open for all the students who have undertaken CS204: Computer Architecture or a similar course.

The course will dive into many topics pertaining to the current state-of-the art processors. Will also provide quick revision to the related basic topics.

Contents:

1. Measuring and understanding performance of a computer

2. Memory Hierarchy: Cache, Main Memory, Storage Architectures

3. Instruction Level Parallelism

   • Super scalar architectures: out-of-order, Multiple issue, Speculation, Branch prediction, Value prediction;

4. Thread Level Parallelism

   • Shared and distributed memory architectures, cache coherence, Interconnect

5. Data Level Parallelism

   • Vector, SIMD, GPU architectures

1. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by David A Patterson, John L Hennessy, 5^th edition.

2. Memory Systems: Cache, DRAM, Disk by Bruce Jacob, Spencer Ng and David Wang, 2007.

3. Fundamental/high-impact research papers.

Reference books:

1. Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach by David B Kirk and Wen-mei W Hwu, 3rd edition.

2. Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective by Randal E Bryant, David R O’Hallaron, 3^rd edition.

1. Best 2 Quiz : 10%

–We will try to have a quiz after every module.

2. Paper reading, presentations, case studies: 15%

–These studies will be related to the topics discussed in the lectures.

3. Mid-sem: 15% (During 24thSept –3rdOct 2021)

4. Lab assignments: 15%

–You will be working with architectural simulators like Sniper/Zsim, Champsim/Ramulator

5. Term paper: 15%

–This is not a survey paper. You will need to come up with a reasonable idea! Get first-cut results!

6. End-sem: 30%(During 27thNov –5thDec)

–In case we continue online, the weightage of Term-paper will increase and End-sem will decrease.

Week 1 (3-7 Aug 2021)

• 4th Aug: Kick-off session. Live session recording. Slides.

• 5th Aug: Module 0 Lecture 1: Video, slides.

• 6th Aug: Module 0 Lecture 2: Video, slides.

• 7th Aug: Module 0 Lecture 3: Video, slides.

• 11th Aug: Module 1 Basics -

  • Introduction to Memory hierarchy: Video, slides.

  • Cache basics Part I: Video, slides.

  • Cache basics Part II: Video, slides.

  • Cache basics Part III: Video, slides.

  • Cache basics Part IV: Video, slides.

• 12th Aug: Module 1 Lecture 1: Video, slides.

• 12th Aug: Module 1 Lecture 2: Video, slides.

• 13th Aug: Module 1 Lecture 3: Video, slides.

• 17th Aug: Module 1 Lecture 4: Video, slides.

1. Manjunath et al., "Efficiently Prefetching Complex Address Patterns", MICRO, 2015.
2. Samuel and Biswabandan, "Bouquet of Instruction Pointers", ISCA, 2020.

• Assignments would be on specific well-defined explorations using simulators like CBP, Champsim, Sniper, Zsim, DRAMsim.
• Assignments will be released as and when the related concept is discussed in the theory.
• Students can use the Dept. of CSE HPC resources to conduct these experiments.