CMSC 411 Section 0201
Computer System Architecture
Spring 2002
http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2002/cmsc411/
Professor: Dr. Sam H. Noh
Office 3225, A.V. Williams Building
Phone (301) 405-1226
E-Mail noh@cs.umd.edu
Office hours: TBA
T.A.: Abdel-Hameed Badawy (absalom@glue.umd.edu)
Office AVW 1418
Office Hours: Mon/Wed
2-3 or by appointment
For all homework related questions, please see the TA first. If you cannot resolve the problem with the TA, then come see me.
Required Text: Computer Architecture, A Quantitative
Approach by Patterson and Hennessy,
2nd Edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 1996.
Recommended Text: Computer Organization & Design: The
Hardware/Software Interface by Hennessey and Patterson, 2nd
Edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 1998. (This text covers the preliminaries required
for this course, and should be used for reviews of ideas/concepts/techniques
that need reminding or need to be cleared up.)
Other Readings: As required.
Workload: This course
requires a lot of reading. We will be covering a large part of the text (which
is over 700 pages long). You are also required to read at least one technical
paper for the term paper. Hence, expect lots of reading. The bright side is
that no programming is required.
Grading: Homeworks (5%)
2 Midterms (40%: 20% each)
Term Paper (5%)
Final Exam (50%)
** Homeworks will be randomly graded. However, they must be submitted. The point of the homework is to review the ideas/concepts and make you think on your own. Try to form a study group and discuss the homeworks. Some of them will be really mind-boggling.
**No makeup of missed exams will be given. If you, for some emergency, have
to miss the exam I must be informed prior to the start of the exam, and the
reason must be for some real emergency that can be verified.
**Re-grade policy. All requests to change grading of homework or
exams must be submitted in writing (typed) within one week of when the
assignment was made available for pickup. Requests must be specific and explain
why you feel your answer deserves additional credit. A request to re-grade can
result in the entire question(s)
being re-evaluated and as a result the score of any part of the questions(s) may be increased or
lowered as appropriate.
Academic Honesty: All work in the homework, exams, and the term
paper is to be wholly your own. Plagiarism and dishonesty of any kind regarding
material related to your overall grade will not be tolerated, and will be
considered a violation of the academic honor code. Violations will result in a
grade of F for the course.
Term Paper: The term paper will
be a summary of a technical paper
on an aspect of the computer architecture. (Note that you may have to read/skim ahead a little to find a topic that
may interest you). It must be a topic that is relevant to the chapters (Chapters
3, 5, 6, and 8) that are covered in this
course. This term paper is only worth 5% of the total grade. However, by doing
this term project, I hope to convey to you the fact that advances in this area
are continuing to this day.
Though you are to pick the topic (paper), I would like to have a well-rounded set of topics to be covered for the class as a whole. Hence, after your initial submission of the preferred topic, I will be the one to finally decide if the particular topic is appropriate or not. Roughly, I would like a distribution of 40%, 20%, 20%, and 20% for each of the aforementioned chapters, respectively.
The term paper should essentially provide a
summary of the paper of choice, that is, it’s relevance to previous research,
what the main idea is, why this idea is important (motivation behind this
study), quantitative results and their implication, etc. Verbatim copying of
contents of the paper will be considered plagiarism!!
The paper is to be selected from a list of
conferences and journals (between the years 1998 and 2001) that I will point
out later on the web.
The completed paper is expected to be no longer
that 5 pages using type-setting software such as MS-Word or Latex, with 11-font
letter sizes and 1.5 line spacing. Papers exceeding this page limit should
expect unfavorable grading.
Submission deadlines:
Selection of paper - Feb. 26, 2002
Must submit first page of
paper that shows title, authors, and abstract.
You will forfeit your right to submit a final paper if you miss this first
submission!!
Re-selection of paper (if required) - within two weeks of
initial submission
Completed Paper - April 25, 2002
Preliminaries:
For the term paper: I expect you to know how to write a
research report. This means finding, reading, summarizing papers on advanced
topics, and including these as references to the writing. Clear-cut, concise
writing is expected. Long dreary writing will have negative effects on your
grades.
For the lecture:
I expect you will be somewhat familiar with:
A COMPUTER and its major parts
Some assembly language
Concepts of sequential execution
instruction loops, index registers,
fetches, stores, branches, add, subtract
Data types (integers, reals, characters, strings) and their representation in some machine
Addressing modes
Condition codes
Procedure call / return and parameter passing
Basic I/O principles
Differences between sequential / random I/O
Binary
versus textual I/O
Tentative Breakdown of Lectures: 29 in total
1 lecture on overview of the course
2-3 lectures on Chapter One
3-4 lectures on Chapter Two
4-5 lectures on Chapter Three
7-8 lectures on Chapter Five
2-3 lectures on Chapter Six
3-4 lectures on Chapter Eight
2 midterms