Fall 2007 Course Announcement

EE653--Advanced Topics in Micro-architecture

Professor Michel Dubois
Tuesday/Thursday 2-3:20 VHE210 

Synopsis
This course focusses on current research in microprocessor design to speed up the execution of instructions in various contexts and under power, complexity and cost constraints. This is a research-oriented course. 

Current technological trends favor Chip Multiprocessors and Core Multithreading (CMP/CMT) and, this semester, the emphasis of the course will be on CMP/CMTs. Besides performance the course explores novel micro-architectural techniques to improve power dissipation, temperature control, noise, reliability, programmability, and to deal with the impact of wire delays. In future Moore’s law as it applies to computing will continue to hold valid by increasing the number of threads executing in parallel in a CMP/CMT micro-architecture. This ever-increasing concurrency and the architectural support to address current technological problems are the challenges of micro-architecture research in the next decade. 

Readings
Current research papers from computer architecture conferences such as MICRO, ISCA, HPCA, PACT and ASPLOS. 

Required Prerequisite:
EE557. Computer System Architecture.
Hennessy and Patterson: “Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach--3rd Edition,” 2002, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Full understanding of the material in chapters 1,2,3,4,5,6 and Appendix A is required. If you took EE557 and some of this material was not covered extensively you must learn it on your own before taking the class. 

Project
The project is a major component of this course, as this is a research-oriented course. Students will learn to use state of the art tools to conceive and advocate a particular micro-architecture idea. Students should team up in teams of two. Towards the end of the semester, each team is expected to make a presentation to the class about their project and to produce a report organized and formatted as a research paper. 

Please address any question you may have about this course offering to: 

Michel Dubois
EEB228, (213)740-4475
dubois@paris.usc.edu