INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTER ORGANIZATION

Credit Hours: 4 · Undergraduate Lower-Level

This course introduces students to the organization of computer systems in order that they gain an understanding of how a computer system executes their programs. Students will learn how to write small-scale programs in C, how to read the translation of those programs into assembly language, and how those programs are executed at the machine level. Specific topics covered will include data representation at the machine level, static versus dynamic memory allocation, instruction set architecture and the encoding of instructions in memory, linking relocatable object files to create executable files, pipelining within the processor, and caching within the memory system.