CMSC 411: COMPUTER SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE

Catalog Description

Input/output processors and techniques. Intra-system communication, buses, caches. Addressing and memory hierarchies. Microprogramming, parallelism, and pipelining.

Objective

This course introduces the basic concepts of computer architectures. It starts with the structure of subsystems and covers the organization of the overall system.

Prerequisites

(CMSC 311 and CMSC 330) or CMSC 400.

Topics

  1. Historical Perspective (1 week)
  2. Hardware Technology (1 week)
  3. CPU Design, Instruction Sets, Data Flow, Vector, Array ,RISC, CISC (2 weeks)
  4. Microprogramming (1 week)
  5. I/O Devices (1 week)
  6. I/O System, System Bus, Interrupt Handling, DMA, Channels (2 weeks)
  7. Memory Systems, Hardware Structure, Design of caches (2 weeks)
  8. Virtual Memory, Relocation, Paging, Segmentation (2 weeks)
  9. Advanced Architectures, Parallel Machines, Data Flow, (1 week)
  10. Computer Networking (1 week)

Course Text

William Stalling, Computer Organization and Architecture, Principles of Structure and Function, Second Edition, William Stalling, MacMillan, 1990.

Typical Grading and Workload