Semester: 2

Credit: 3

Program: Computer science

Course Module: compulsory

Responsible: Wei Lu

E-mail: luwei@tju.edu.cn

Department: School of Electronics Information Engineering, Tianjin University

Time Allocation (1 credit hour = 45 minutes)

Course Description

The course introduces various structures of micro-computer systems, techniques for designing a computing system and methods for analyzing its performance, instruction set of the processor, interface between processor and memory, I/O devices. The course provides preliminary knowledge for developing an applicable computer or embedded system.

Prerequisite

Digital Logic; Programming Language

Course Objectives

Students should get familiar with the following: common architecture of computer systems, instruction set and assembly language programming, pipelining, memory hierarchy, I/O system, multi-processor and parallelism, and how to measure the performance of a certain microprocessor system.

Course Syllabus

Lecture:

1. Computer Abstractions and Technology  (2 credit hours)

Introduction to program and hardware; manufacturing of processors and memory chips; performance.

1. Instructions: Language of the Computer  (4 credit hours)

Operations of the computer hardware; operands of the computer hardware; signed and unsigned numbers; representing instructions in the computer; logical operations; instructions for making decisions; procedure.

1. Arithmetic for Computers  (3 credit hours)

Add and subtraction; multiplication, division, floating point.

1. The Processor  (4 credit hours)

A simple implementation; pipelining.

1. Large and Fast: Exploiting Memory Hierarchy  (3 credit hours)

Caches; measuring and improving cache performance; virtual memory.

1. Storage and Other I/O Topics  (2 credit hours)

Disk storage, flash Storage; connecting processor to memory and I/O devices; designing an I/O System.

1. Multicores, Multiprocessors, and Clusters  (2 credit hours)

The difficulty of creating parallel programs; shared memory multiprocessors; clusters and other message-passing multiprocessors; SISD, MIMD, SIMD, SPMD, and Vector; Graphics Processing Units.

Computer Lab:

1. Experiments for performance benchmarking.  (4 credit hours)

2. Programming with assembly language.  (8 credit hours)

Textbooks & References

• David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy, and Morgan Kaufmann. Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface (4th ed). ARM Edition, 2010.

Reference:

• Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Todd Austin. Structured Computer Organization (6th ed). Pearson, 2012.

Capability Tasks

CT1: To understand basic science, and to have analytical ability and the ability to integrate related knowledge.

CT3: To grasp methodologies and engineering tools: identifying, utilizing and solving problems. Even if the students are not familiar with the content, they can turn to computer tools for systematic analysis.

Achievements

• Common architecture of computer systems. - Level: N

• Instruction set and assembly language programming. - Level: M

• Pipelining. - Level: A

• Memory hierarchy and I/O system. - Level: A

• Multi-processor and parallelism. - Level: N

• How to measure the performance of a certain microprocessor system. - Level: M

Students: Computer science, Year 1