ADVANCED COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
CT 765 04
Course Objectives:
The main objective of the advanced computer aarchitecture is to provide advanced knowledge of computer architecture including parallel architectures, instruction-level parallel architectures, superscalar architectures, thread and process-level parallel architecture.
- Computational Models(6 hours)
- computational model,
- the von Neumann Computational model,
- Evolution and interpretation of the concept of computer architecture,
- Interpretation of the concept of the computer architectures at different levels of abstraction,
- Multilevel hierarchical framework
- Parallel Processing(7 hours)
- Process, Thread, Processes and threads in languages,
- Concurrent and parallel execution and programming languages,
- Types of available parallelism,
- Levels of available functional parallelism,
- Utilization of functional parallelism,
- Classification of parallel architectures,
- Relationships between languages and parallel architectures
- Pipelined Processors(7 hours)
- Principle of pipelining,
- Structure of pipelines,
- Performance measures,
- Application scenarios of pipelines,
- Layout of a pipeline, Dependence resolution,
- Design space,
- Pipelined processing of loads and stores
- Superscalar Processors(8 hours)
- The emergence and widespread adaption of superscalar processors,
- Specific tasks of superscalar processing,
- Parallel decoding,
- superscalar instruction issue,
- Scope of shelving,
- Layout of shelving buffers,
- Operand fetch policies,
- Instruction dispatch schemes ,
- Scope of register renaming with example
- Processing of control transfer Instructions(7 hours)
- Types of branches, Performance measures of branch processing ,
- branch handling ,
- Delayed branching,
- Branch processing,
- Multiday branching
- Thread and Process-level Parallel Architectures(10 hours)
- MIMD architectures
- Distributed memory MIMD architectures,
- Fine-gain and Medium-gain systems,
- Coarse-grain multicomputer,
- Cache coherence
- Uniform memory access(UMA) machines,
- Cache-coherent non-uniform memory access(CC-NUMA) machines,
- Cache only memory architecture(COMA)
References:
- Advanced Computer Architectures: a design space approach, Deszo Sima, Terence Fountain, Peter Kacsuk
- Computer Architecture and organization, John P. Hayes
- Computer Organization and Design, David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy
Evaluation Scheme:
The questions will cover all the chapters of the syllabus. The evaluation scheme will be as indicated in the table below:
Chapters |
Hours |
Marks Distribution* |
1 |
6 |
10 |
2 |
7 |
13 |
3 |
7 |
13 |
4 |
8 |
14 |
5 |
7 |
13 |
6 |
10 |
17 |
Total |
45 |
80 |
*There could be a minor deviation in Marks distribution
|