CS-622: Advanced Computer Architecture Seminar
Spring 2008

 Instructor: Dr. Dmitry Ponomarev
Phone: (607) 777-4023
E-mail: dima at cs dot binghamton dot edu

Class meets: Monday, Wednesday, 6:00 - 7:30 pm


Course Syllabus (pdf version)

Course description and format:
The primary objective of this course is to present a broad overview of current research topics and interesting developments in the field of computer architecture. A major paradigm shift with the recent advent of multicore architectures poses a lot of new challenges and opens up a lot of new research opportunities. In addition to performance, the issues of power, energy, temperature, reliability, security and resiliency in the face of process variations in multicore environment are receiving a great deal of attention by the computer architecture research community. In this course, we will mostly read and discuss recent key papers from top computer architecture conferences encompassing a variety of topics listed below. Each paper will first be introduced by a student through a short presentation, and then the paper will be discussed. Presentations will be short (10-15 minutes) with the only goal of initiating the subsequent discussions. Occasional lectures by the instructor will also be given,

Course objectives:
To present a broad overview of current active research topics in computer architecture To reinforce the understanding of the design and the implementation of modern microprocessors. To gain hands-on research experience by working with cycle-accurate processor simulators and power and timing analysis tools.

Tentative list of topics to be covered:

  • Multicore and multithreaded architectures
  • Design of memory systems for multicore architectures
  • Architectural support for transactional memory
  • Architectural support for security
  • Power, energy and temperature-aware architectures and power-performance trade-off studies.
  • Adaptive and reconfigurable architectures
  • Architectures resilient to process variations
  • Non-traditional computer architectures
  • Case studies of real chip designs

    Reading materials:
    We will mainly rely on recent research papers from the top architecture conferences. Readings for each week will be posted on the class web page. For each assigned paper, students will have to turn in a critique (one page document) at the beginning of the class when the paper is discussed. Each student will also present several of these papers in class.

    Final project
    The semester-long final project will be the most important part of the course from both the educational and the grading perspectives. The default project is to design and evaluate a non-trivial extension to an existing technique or propose and evaluate a new idea along the lines of the material discussed in class. Projects can either be done individually or in groups of two. It is expected that successful projects will lead to conference paper submissions. Due to the scope of the final project, this course satisfies large program development requirement

    Tools: We will be using the various microarchitectural simulators (PTLsim, Simplescalar, M-Sim, etc) and related power and timing analysis tools (Wattch, Cacti).

    Grades:

  • Final project - 60%
  • Critiques and analysis of papers - 20%
  • Presentations and class participation - 20%.

    Prerequisite: CS-522 or the instructor's permission