Computer architecture

Course Description This course provides a strong foundation in modern computer system architecture by drawing together concepts from across the electrical and computer engineering curriculum including digital logic design, computer organization, system-level software techniques, and engineering design. The course is structured around the three primary building blocks of general-purpose computing systems: processors, memories, and networks. The first half of the course focuses on the fundamentals of each building block. Topics include instruction set architecture; single-cycle processors; hardwired vs. microcoded FSM processors; pipelined processors; direct-mapped vs. associative caches; pipelined caches; network topology, routing, and flow control; and integrating processors, memories, and networks. The second half of the course delves into more advanced techniques and will enable students to understand how these three building blocks can be integrated to build a modern shared-memory multicore system. Topics include superscalar execution, out-of-order execution, register renaming, memory disambiguation, branch prediction, and speculative execution; multithreaded, VLIW, and SIMD processors; non-blocking cache memories; memory protection, translation, and virtualization; and memory synchronization, consistency, and coherence. Students will learn how to evaluate design decisions in the context of past, current, and future application requirements and technology constraints. T...

This course can help learners form a strong foundation in the understanding and design of modern computing systems. Building on a computer organization base, this course explores techniques that go into designing a modern microprocessor. Fundamental understanding of computer architecture is key not only for students interested in hardware and processor design, but is a foundation for students interested in compilers, operating systems, and high performance programming. This course will explore how the computer architect can utilize the increasing number of transistors available to improve the performance of a processor. Focus will be given to architectures that can exploit different forms of parallelism, whether they be implicit or explicit. This course covers architectural techniques such as multi-issue superscalar processors, out-of-order processors, Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processors, advanced caching, and multiprocessor systems. "Thank you for making this excellent course available! It was very insightful, the explanations were great -- it really helped to understand a lot of the behind-the-scenes magic that I've been taking for granted in 20 years as a software engineer. Thanks a lot!" "Absolutely Amazing course. Challenging questions on the mid-term and the finals." "I am a VLSI Design professional working in the field of CPU/SoC architecture and Design. This course helped me to reinforce the basics and also to find more interesting topics to explore and re...

Electrical Engineering Electrical Engineers design systems that sense, process, and transmit energy and information. We leverage computational, theoretical, and experimental tools to develop groundbreaking sensors and energy transducers, new physical substrates for computation, and the systems that address the shared challenges facing humanity. • Artificial Intelligence + Decision-making Artificial Intelligence and Decision-making combines intellectual traditions from across computer science and electrical engineering to develop techniques for the analysis and synthesis of systems that interact with an external world via perception, communication, and action; while also learning, making decisions and adapting to a changing environment. • • We design the next generation of computer systems. Working at the intersection of hardware and software, our research studies how to best implement computation in the physical world. We design processors that are faster, more efficient, easier to program, and secure. Our research covers systems of all scales, from tiny Internet-of-Things devices with ultra-low-power consumption to high-performance servers and datacenters that power planet-scale online services. We design both general-purpose processors and accelerators that are specialized to particular application domains, like machine learning and storage. We also design Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools to facilitate the development of such systems. Advances in computer archite...

Computer architecture is the art and science of meeting the performance, power, energy, temperature, reliability, and accuracy goals of software, ranging from large-scale AI and cloud services to safety-critical embedded services, by composing principled and well-abstracted hardware that harnesses the latest in VLSI technology and trends. As Moore’s Law and Dennard scaling wane, the question of how best to continue building principled and programmable hardware that can meet the ever-increasing computational needs of next-generation AI in large-scale data centers and edge/embedded settings is vital to the continued success of the computer sciences. Faculty working in this area: faculty email website Abhishek Bhattacharjee Yongshan Ding Highlights in this area:

Cornell University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering ECE 4750 / CS 4420 / ECE 5740 Computer Architecture Fall 2022 Prof. Christopher Batten Mon/Wed @ 2:45–4:00pm • 120 Physical Sciences Building syllabus | Course Information Cross Listed CS 4420 Computer Architecture Co-Meet ECE 5740 Computer Architecture Instructor Prof. Christopher Batten, 323 Rhodes Hall Office Hours: 323 Rhodes Hall, Tuesday, 4:30–5:30pm Admin. Assistant Kimberly Budd, 314 Rhodes Hall, [email protected] Graduate TAs Lauren Shen, ljs324, Office/Lab Hours: 314 Phillips, Tue, 7:30–9:30pm Angela Zou, az292, Office/Lab Hours: 314 Phillips, Thu, 7:30–9:30pm Owen Deng, qd39, Office/Lab Hours: 314 Phillips, Tue, 7:30–9:30pm Ronin Sharma, rrs234, Office/Lab Hours: 314 Phillips, Wed, 7:30–9:30pm Undergraduate TAs Romano Tio, rat83, Office/Lab Hours: 314 Phillips, Wed, 7:30–9:30pm Austin Brown, ajb497, Office/Lab Hours: 314 Phillips, Mon, 7:30–9:30pm Lily Yu, gly6, Office/Lab Hours: 314 Phillips, Thu, 7:30–9:30pm Lectures 120 Physical Sciences Building, Monday and Wednesday, 2:45–4:00pm Disc. Section 165 Olin Hall, Friday, 2:40–3:30pm Required Materials J. L. Hennessy and D. A. Patterson "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" 5th edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 2012 Available on Canvas, Amazon ($80) Cornell library has e-book and hard copy D. M. Harris and S. L. Harris "Digital Design and Computer Architecture" 2nd edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 2012 Amazon ($63) Cornell library has e-book and hard copy...