15-346 Computer Architecture: Design and Simulation

Spring 2022

15-346 Pittsburgh: MWF 12:20-1:10PM Virtual (2 weeks) then CFA Brian Railing

12 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	Brian Railing Selected Lecture Notes
Credit	12 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-s22
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-s22/

Instructors

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