This course covers topics such as: basics of pipeline structure, advanced pipelining and instruction level parallelism, multiprocessor and thread-level parallelism, memory-hierarchy design (main memory, virtual memory, caches), storage systems, interconnection networks, multiprocessor architectures (centralized and distributed). Advanced topics related to new emerging computer architectures will also be presented. The emphasis in each topic is on fundamental limitations and the trade-offs involved in designing computer systems, including memory and processing bandwidth, network bandwidth and latency, synchronization, and storage system bandwidth and latency. (First offering Winter 2013.)
