Introduction to Computer Architecture and Machine-Level Programming

Identifier
COMS 3210
Professor(s)
Jeremy Sheaffer

Last Updated: Spring 2025

Offered during Fall and Spring Semesters each year.

  1. Credits and contact hours: 3 credits, 3 contact hours
  2. Textbook, title, author, and year: Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface, David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy.
  3. Other supplemental materials: The C Programming Languague, Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie.

Specific course information

  1. Brief description of the content of the course: Introduction to computer architecture and organization. Emphasis on evaluation of performance, instruction set architecture, datapath and control, memory-hierarchy design, and pipelining. Assembly language programming.
  2. Prerequisites or co-requisites: Minimum of C- in COMS 2280 and MATH 1650; COMS 2300 or CPRE 2810; ENGL 2500

Specific goals for the course

  • 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 ARM, and building more complex ideas from simple ones.

This course has three major ABET outcomes:

  1. An ability to analyze a problem and identify and define the computing requirements appropriate to its solution.
  2. An ability to design, implement, and evaluate a computer-based system, process, component, or program to meet desired needs.
  3. An ability to apply mathematical foundations, algorithmic principles, and computer science theory in the modeling and design of computer-based systems that demonstrate comprehension of the tradeoffs involved in design choices.

Brief list of topics to be covered

  • Chapter 1: Computer abstractions and technology: Measuring and evaluating performance, metrics of performance, cost/benefit tradeoffs, instruction count, CPI, clock cycle time, comparing and summarizing performance, the switch from uniprocessors to multiprocessors (Sec 1.8), Amdahl's law (Sec 1.10)
  • Chapter 2: Instructions: Language of the Computer: Instruction set architecture and assembly language of LEGv8, signed and unsigned numbers, representing instructions - the LEGv8 instruction set, instructions for decision making, arithmetic and logical operations, arithmetic overflow, Parallelism and instructions: synchronization (Sec 2.11), a sorting example
  • Chapter 3: Arithmetic for Computers: Addition and subtraction, multiplication, division, parallelism and computer arithmetic (Sec 3.6), Streaming SIMD extensions (Sec 3.7)
  • Chapter 4: The Processor: Building a datapath, pipelining, pipelined datapath and control, hazards in pipelining, exceptions (Sec 4.9), parallelism via instructions (Sec 4.10)
  • Chapter 5: Large and fast: exploiting memory hierarchy: A framework for memory hierarchies, the basics of caches, Placement, replacement, and memory interaction policies, Virtual machines and virtual memory, parallelism and memory hierarchy: cache coherence (Sec 5.10)
  • Chapter 6: Introduction to GPUs.