Announcements

Lecturer:

David Patterson

Course Consultant:

Joe Gebis
email: gebis@eecs.berkeley.edu

Class Email List:

n252-class@imail.eecs.berkeley.edu

Please use this address for asking questions that will be of interest to everyone.

Textbook:

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (4th Ed.) by J. Hennessy and D. Patterson, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers

Background Reading:

Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface (3rd Ed.) by D. Patterson and J. Hennessy, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers

Administrative Contact:

CalVIEW

205 McLaughlin Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720

Phone: 510-642-5776
Fax: 510-643-5877
Email: ntu@coe.berkeley.edu
Web page: www.coe.berkeley.edu/calview

Course Description:

This course focuses on the techniques of quantitative analysis and evaluation of modern computing systems, such as the selection of appropriate benchmarks to reveal and compare the performance of alternative design choices in system design. The emphasis is on the major component subsystems of high performance computers: pipelining, instruction level parallelism, memory hierarchies, input/output, and network-oriented interconnections.

Prerequisites:

Equivalents to Berkeley CS152. Familiarity with basic computer system design (instruction set, computer arithmetic, controller and datapath design, memory system, etc.). Design experience using hardware description languages (HDL) is helpful.