CMSC 611: Advanced Computer Architecture

TuTh 4:00-5:15, LH 5

Instructor: Dr. Marc Olano (olano umbc.edu)
ITE 354 (455-3094); Office Hours: Tue Thu 2:45-3:45

TA: Yifang Liu (yifliu1 umbc.edu)
ITE 340; Office Hours: Thu 5:20-7:20

Prerequisite: CMSC 411 or equivalent

Text: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 3rd edition, John L Hennessy and David A Patterson. Required.

Goal: Develop an understanding of the principles and practices employed in the design and evaluation of processors and computer systems.

Class Web Page

Important announcements and updates will be made to this class web page throughout the semester (www.cs.umbc.edu/~olano/611/). I will announce at the beginning of class if I make a significant change or addition.

Grades

Your grades will be based on homework assignments given approximately every other week, an in-class mid-term, a cumulative final exam, and a final project (done in pairs). The total grade breakdown will be as follows:

Electronic Submission

Assignments and the final project are to be submitted electronically by midnight at the end of the day they are due using the submit program on the gl.umbc.edu systems. You can use ssh to access the gl systems remotely. The submission commands for homework 1 would be:

Note that the submit commands and project names are case sensitive. If turning in an assignment late, submit to HW1-late rather than HW1.

Late Policy

Assignments submitted up to one week late will be penalized 20 percent of the possible score. Assignments more than one week late will receive a score of 0. Each student gets one free "late" (i.e. up to one week late without penalty, but still zero if later than one week) to apply to any of the assignments. Your free late must be claimed in writing on or before the due date.

Academic Honesty

By enrolling in this course, each student assumes the responsibilities of an active participant in UMBC's scholarly community in which everyone's academic work and behavior are held to the highest standards of honesty. Cheating, fabrication, plagiarism, and helping others to commit these acts are all forms of academic dishonesty, and they are wrong.

All assignments in the course are expected to be your individual work. You may discuss assignments with anyone. Any help you receive, however, must be documented. At the beginning of each program or assignment, you must include a comment indicating the sources you used while working on it (excluding course staff and text) and the type of help you received from each. If you received no help, say so. Failure to include this comment will result in your program being returned ungraded.

Tentative Schedule

Homeworks are marked to show whether they will be due on the Tuesday (Tue) or Thursday (Thu) of each indicated week.

Readings should be completed before the first date listed below for maximum benefit. In many cases, the readings may be lengthy (covering most of a 1000+ page book over the course of the semester). You are, of course, free to choose your own strategy. At the very least, I'd recommend skimming the readings before class then re-reading difficult sections in depth after class. Without a doubt, prior exposure to the concepts we will be covering will aid your understanding.

VHDL Resources

• UMBC/Cadence VHDL Guide
• Jim Plusquellic's Cadence VHDL Tutorial Slides
• Jim Plusquellic's VHDL Tutorial Slides
• Peter Ashenden's VHDL Guides

Class Resources

There is a class email list for announcements and student questions: cmsc611@listproc.umbc.edu. Feel free to also use this list as a means to ask questions of me or your fellow students. The list will only accept mail from subscribed addresses. I have pre-subscribed the umbc.edu address for each student enrolled in the course as of Friday, August 22nd. You can add, change or remove your umbc.edu address subscription using the web interface at listproc.umbc.edu. To subscribe a non-umbc.edu address, you'll need to use the email interface, documented in the ListProc Users FAQ at listproc.umbc.edu/user/