This is supplemental course information, designed to give you a fuller picture of the course and an expanded look at the topics covered. This is an unofficial document. The USC Course Catalog is the binding description of all university courses. Information such as books, materials covered, and the order of topics is subject to change. Please consult instructor for this semseter to get more upto date course information.

557 Computer Systems Architecture (3, FaSp) Comparative studies of computer system components: the CPU, memory, and I/O; analytical modeling techniques to allow comparative evaluation of architectures; parallelism and supercomputers. Prerequisite: EE 457Lx and CSCI 455x. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Third Edition, Morgan Kaufman Publishers Inc., by Hennessy & Patterson (copies available on reserve in Seaver Science Library)
Good background in computer organization (EE 457), reasonable programming experience (CSCI 455x), familiarity with compilers and operating system concepts (CSCI 402) Dr. Timothy M. Pinkston, email: tpink@usc.edu Part I: Microprocessor Architecture
Introduction, Fundamentals, Performance and Cost
Instruction Set Design and Examples
Pipelining Fundamentals: Hazards, Interrupts, Static and Dynamic Scheduling
Advanced Hardware and Compiler Techniques to Exploit ILP, TLP:
Dynamic Prediction/Speculation, Multi-Issue, VLIW/EPIC, Software Pipelining
Memory Hierarchy Design and Storage Subsystem (as time permits)
Survey Current Microprocessor/Embedded Processor Architectures and Review

Part II: Parallel Processor Architecture
Introduction, Classification, Design Challenges
Interconnection Networks: Topology, Routing, Flow Control
Shared Memory, Message Passing, and Multithreading:
Latency Reduction, Hiding, and Tolerating Techniques
Survey Current Multiprocessor/Cluster Computing Architectures

Performance evaluation using the SimpleScalar simulator tool will be performed.

Prepared by: Pinkston    Date: Dec. 2003