Comp Hardware Sys Architect

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Evolution of the design of computer systems and the factors shaping their hardware/software system architectures. Topics may include: Amdahl’s law, Flynn’s taxonomy, Moore's Law and silicon chip and system physical properties, parallelism in processor architecture, memory hierarchies (cache and virtual memory), processor micro-architecture and pipelining, protection and sharing, I/O and interrupts, in-order and out-of-order superscalar architectures, VLIW machines, vector supercomputers, multicores, clusters, multithreaded architectures, symmetric multiprocessors, parallel computational models and programming, GPU and special-purpose graphics processors, reconfigurable logic and special-purpose processors. Undergraduates may enroll with instructor's permission.