Office: Atanasoff 103
Office Hours: MW 11am-12noon (or come by the office or make an appointment by email).
Voice: (515) 294-8052
Email:
Periodically, important announcements will be made in this area. Please check every day for updates.
xspim MIPS simulator to execute assembly language
programs.
Note to students with disabilities: If you have a documented disability and anticipate needing accommodations in this course, please make arrangements to meet with me soon. Please request that a Disability Resources staff send a SAAR (Student Academic Accommodation Request) form verifying your disability and specifying the accommodation you will need.
Instructor: Dimitris
Margaritis
Office: Atanasoff 103
Office Hours: MW 11am-12noon (or come by the office or make an appointment by email).
Voice: (515) 294-8052
Email:
Teaching Assistant: Matthew Patitz
Office: Atanasoff B06
Office hours: Tu 11am-12noon, Wed 11am-12noon
Email: mpatitz@cs.iastate.edu
The authors provide lecture notes for the course.
Course Objectives: To understand aspects of computer architecture and program performance. To adopt an evolutionary approach to learning by presenting fundamental concepts first in the context of an easy-to-understand instruction set such as MIPS, and building more complex ideas from the simpler ones. To demonstrate throughout the interrelationship of hardware and software.
The course will cover the following topics, either completely or partially, as time permits.
Your final grade in this course will be based on homeworks, quizzes, activities, and exams. These will be weighted as follows.
You are guaranteed to receive the highest applicable letter grade based on the following scale.
The instructor reserves the right to raise grades. For example, if your final grade is 84%, you are guaranteed to receive at least a B, but you may receive a B+.
Graders will email scores for homeworks and exams to students. Grades may be appealed for ONE WEEK after they are emailed except the final exam whose grade will be emailed by request only. After the appeal period has expired, grade change requests may be denied.
Homework assignments will be announced in class and on this page and will be discussed during recitation. ALL homework must be turned in electronically (see the section on electronic submission). Written work must be submitted as plain ASCII text. The graders must be able to view your homework using a text editor such as vi, emacs, or pico. Optionally you can scan your handwritten homework in PDF, and submit the resulting PDF file, although that is not encouraged. However, Word or WordPerfect files will not be accepted!
Homework assignments are individual efforts, not group efforts. You are expected to complete your work on your own. You can discuss general concepts with your classmates, however, any collaboration beyond that (particularly on the specific problems assigned) would be considered academic dishonesty. See the University's Academic Dishonesty Policy for details.
When in doubt, contact the TA or the instructor for clarification.
We may call in some students selected randomly to be quizzed on the submitted homeworks.
Homework assignments will be penalized 15% per day past the deadline, up to 3 days. For instance, if you turn in a homework 2 days late, your grade will be multiplied by 0.70. No homework will be accepted after 3 days. Also, homework assignments will not be accepted before the next recitation session.
There will be three exams, all one-hour, in-class. The tentative exam schedule for Exam 1 is the 5th week, Exam 2 on the 9th week, and Exam 3 on Thu. Dec. 15, 9:45am - 11:45am. All exams will be held in the classroom where the lectures are delivered.
Exam 3 will cover the material after Exam 2 (memory hierarchy and pipelining) i.e., it will NOT be comprehensive.
All exams will be closed-book, closed-notes. Please bring a photo ID and a calculator with you to each exam. To reschedule an exam or for special considerations, please contact the instructor at least one week prior to the exam date. Missed exams will not be re-offered except under extreme circumstances.
All homework assignments must be turned in electronically, using a script called turnin. The script is invoked by calling
~cs321/public/bin/turnin Assignment
(You may copy the script to your account or create an alias to
reduce your typing requirements.) The script copies everything within
your current working directory to a directory named
Assignment in the TA's grading account. Note that the
script must be invoked from one of the Red Hat PCs (e.g.,
popeye). Use caution when submitting an assignment: if you turn in the
same assignment more than once, your previous submission will be
erased. You should receive email confirmation of your submitted
files. If you don't, or you if you receive an email without
mentioning your files, there was a problem with the submission.
In this case, contact the TA or the instructor for help.
turnin script in your
home directory!
A common mistake is to run the turnin script in one's
home directory. This will send all contents of your home
directory to the ComS 321 account!
This example assumes that the script has been aliased, by adding
the following line to your .cshrc file.
alias turnin321 ~cs321/public/bin/turnin
mkdir tmp
cd tmp
cp ~/hw1/hw1.txt .
turnin321 HW1
This is an automated response. Please do not reply.
We have received your "HW1" submission at Wed Aug 17 17:18:52 CDT 2005.
We now have the following files from you for "HW1":
---------------------------------------------------
hw1.txt
---------------------------------------------------
cd ..
rm -r tmp
If you have any difficulty with electronic submission, please contact a TA or the instructor.