Welcome to the Spring 2013 CS152 web page. The course is intended to provide a foundation for students interested in performance programming, compilers, and operating systems, as well as computer architecture and engineering. Our goal is for you to better understand how software interacts with hardware, and to understand how trends in technology, applications, and economics drive continuing changes in the field. The course will cover the different forms of parallelism found in applications (instruction-level, data-level, thread-level, gate-level) and how these can be exploited with various architectural features. We will cover pipelining, superscalar, speculative and out-of-order execution, vector machines, VLIW machines, multithreading, graphics processing units, and parallel microprocessors. We will also explore the design of memory systems including caches, virtual memory, and DRAM.

An important part of the course is a series of lab assignments using real microprocessor designs implemented in the Chisel hardware description language, and running as simulators and (hopefully) FPGA emulators. These simulators will give you an in-depth look at a variety of processor architectural techniques. Our objective is that you will understand all the major concepts used in modern microprocessors by the end of the semester.

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