CS 422: Computer Architecture

Units: 3-0-0-9

Pre-requisites: ESC101, CS210, CS220, CS330.

Course Contents:

1. Overview of computer architecture, performance evaluation of processors.
2. Pipelining, super-pipelines, advanced pipelines, static and dynamic scheduling, instruction-level parallelism, loop unrolling, VLIW and superscalar processors, vector processing and array processing.
3. Memory bandwith issues, memory organization, cache hierarchy.
4. Symmetric multiprocessors (SMP), NUMA-MPs, massively parallel processors, cache coherence protocols, interconnection networks, I/O processing, multiprocessing, multiplexing, examples of contemporary architectures, RAS (Reliability, Availability, Scalability) features.

Books and References:

1. JL Hennessy, DA Patterson, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 4th Ed., Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier-India, 2006.