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ECS 201B HIGH-PERFORMANCE UNIPROCESSING (4) II

Lecture: 3 hours

Termpaper: 1 hour

Prerequisite: Course ECS 201A

Grading: Letter; one exam (40%), research project (60%)

Catalog Description:
Maximizing uniprocessor performance. Barriers to high performance; solutions to the problems; historical and current processor designs. Not open for credit to students who have completed course 250B.

Goals:
To familiarize the student with the problems inherent in high-performance processor design, and to expose the student to the various methods for dealing with these problems.

Expanded Course Description:

  1. Limits to High Performance
    The various impediments to achieving high performance will be detailed.
  2. Pipelining and High Performance
    The usefulness of pipelining as a method for achieving high performance will be presented, as will the inherent limitations. Details on techniques used to overcome these limits will be examined.
  3. Advanced Memory Design
    Advanced techniques for reducing the memory latency problem, such as the use of I/O queues, advanced caching schemes (including multi-level caches), and intelligent memory systems will be examined.
  4. Special Purpose Processors
    The performance benefits and the regimes in which vector processors are most useful will be explored, as well as other specialty chips (such as Digital Signal Processors).
  5. Single-Chip Processors
    The current and future state of supercomputing will be described.

Textbooks:
M.D. Hill, N.P. Jouppi, and G. S. Sohi, Readings in Computer Architecture, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2000
Selected papers from the literature

Instructor: M. Farrens

Prepared by: M. Farrens (February 2002)

Overlap Statement:
This course does not have a significant overlap with any other course.

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