This course will enable students to grasp concepts and solid understanding of computer design tradeoffs and cutting-edge research in computer architecture. In particular, this course aims at enabling students to acquire:

• detailed knowledge about the structure and organization of advanced processors in different fields of applications, including superscalar and VLIW processors, multi-core and many-cores, heterogeneous architectures, advanced memory hierarchies, and on-chip interconnection networks.
• the ability to design, evaluate and optimize processors and memory sub-system for various fields of applications in a systematic way following a quantitative approach.
• the ability to design, evaluate and optimize advanced architectural features of microprocessors to accelerate different functions of given applications.

By the end of the course, the students should acquire detailed knowledge of computer architecture and understand the major architectural styles and operating principles used in advanced computing systems. They should be able to understand the importance of memory hierarchy, the fundamentals of different types of memory systems, and the design challenges and solutions in advanced memory sub-system for multi-core processors. They should also be able to understand most of the advanced architectural features used in state-of-the-art high-performance computing systems for improving the execution speed of a given application program. Apart from these, the students should be able to understand the emerging architectural trends and the current research in the field of computer architecture.

Computer architecture covers designing and interconnecting different hardware components as well as the required hardware-software interface to enable a computing machine that can meet the functional requirements with high efficiency in terms of cost, performance, energy consumption, dependability, and security. This course provides a solid understanding of the fundamentals of advanced computer architecture used to build modern high-performance and energy-efficient processors. The course will cover the following topics with an emphasis on the state-of-the-art works and emerging trends.

• Fundamentals of Computer Architecture
• Memory Hierarchy
• Cache Architectures, Management and Memory Parallelism
• Main Memory and DRAM Fundamentals
• Out-of-Order Execution
• SIMD Processors and GPUs
• Advanced Branch Prediction and Control-Flow Handling
• State Maintenance and State Recovery
• Instruction Scheduling
• Memory Interfaces and Quality-of-Service
• Multi-Core Cache Management and Cache Coherence
• Prefetching
• Heterogeneous Multi-Cores
• Emerging Memory Technologies
• Interconnects

ECTS Aufstellung:

30h ...   Anwesenheit in der Vorlesung/Übung
50h ...   Lösung der Aufgaben und Projekt
32.5h ...   Vorbereitung auf die Prüfung
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112.5h ...  entspricht 4.5 ECTS

Textbooks:

J.L. Hennessy, D. Patterson: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers

M. Dubois, M. Annavaram, P. Stenström: Parallel Computer Organization and Design, Cambridge University Press

Other Readings:

• Research papers, wherever applicable, that are typically published at top conferences like ISCA, MICRO, HPCA, and ASPLOS. Students are encouraged to dig deeper into the original source of covered topics themselves for more details.
• Lecture Slides.
• Reference Books:
  • Modern Processor Design: Fundamentals of Superscalar Processors, by Shen and Lipasti
  • Parallel Computer Architecture: A Hardware/Software Approach, by Gupta, Culler, Singh, Morgan Kaufmann

* Knowledge of Computer Organization and Design is beneficial.