CISC 701 - Contemporary Computing Systems Architectures

(3 semester hours)
Prerequisites: Admissions to the Computational Sciences Doctoral Program or permission of instructor
Corequisites: CISC 709
Description: This course attempts to change the way students learn and think about the design, organization and hardware of a computing system architecture to meet goals and functional requirements of future technological developments, demystify computer architecture through an emphasis on cost-performance-energy trades-offs and good engineering design. This will help the student to build rigorous quantitative foundation of long-established scientific and engineering disciplines. A special emphasis will be put on demonstrating these concepts through the “Putting It All Together” approach at the end of the set of necessary modules. Modules include pipeline organizations and memory hierarchies of the ARM Cortex A8 processor, the Intel core i7 processor, the NVIDIA GTX-280 and GTX-480 GPUs, and one of the Google warehouse-scale computers, to apply the cost-performance-energy principles to this material, and memory is critical resource for the rest of the modules.