15-346 Computer Architecture: Design and Simulation

Spring 2021 A4

  • 15-346 Pittsburgh: MWF 12:50-1:40PM GHC 4307 + Remote Brian Railing

6 units

This course will help students develop an understanding of basic microarchitectural principles and designs. Starting with creating benchmarks and simulators, students will learn the practice of computer architecture design. The emphasis will be on how processors exploit instruction-level parallelism for performance, as well as the supporting technologies such as caches and branch prediction that are required. Several frontiers of current research will be explored in energy efficiency and security threats.

Course Syllabus

Prerequisites: 15-213

Getting Help

Piazza Piazza
Email Please use Piazza for help, instead of email. Posts to Piazza are private by default.
Tutoring TBD

Course Materials

Schedule Lecture schedule, slides, recitation notes, readings, and code
Labs Details of the labs, due dates, and policies
Assignments Details of the written assignments, due dates, and policies
Exam Information about the final exam
Resources Additional course resources

Course Information

For details See the course syllabus for details (below is just a few overview bits).
Lectures See above
Textbooks Hennessey and Patterson
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach
Credit 6 units
Grading Composed from total lab performance (60%), total written assignment performance (20%) and final exam performance (20%).
Labs There are 4 labs (L1-L4), not evenly weighted. See the labs page for the breakdown.
Exam There is a final exam, held during exam week, closed book.
Home http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~15346-s21
Questions Piazza, office hours
Canvas Canvas will be used (i) to handin written assignments, (ii) to post lecture videos, and (iii) to conduct ungraded, in-class quizzes. Your grading information will be kept up to date in Autolab, not in Canvas.
Course Directory /afs/cs/academic/class/15346-s21/

Instructors

Name Brian Railing
Contact bpr@cs.cmu.edu
Office GHC 6005 (PIT)
Office Hours TBD