CS 757 Computer Architecture II Spring 2011 Section 1 Instructor David A. Wood URL: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~david/courses/cs757/Spring2011/

Motivation Intel is shipping their quad-core 8-thread Nehalem processors, AMD is shipping their six-core Istanbul processors, and Sun is shipping the 8-core, 64-thread Niagara-2 processors. Furthermore, Ambric, Azul, Intel, and Tilera have chips with 48 to 336 cores either shipping or in the works. Larger-scale parallel systems may combine 10s, 100s, or even 1000s of these chips into a single system. The rapid expansion of parallel computing systems is transforming the raw computing power of the desktop, server and cloud. CS 757 will help you understand how multicore and other parallel systems work. We will mix some programming (but not nearly as much as CS758) with detailed study of the hardware architectures.

Prereq Change

This offering of CS/ECE 757 will use CS/ECE 552 (or basic architecture knowledge) as its principal prerequisite. It does not require CS/ECE 752 (despite what the course catalog and timetable say). This is because our focus will be on parallelism issues, not details of core pipelines.

When and Where

Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 11:00am--12:15pm
(Course is overloaded and will meet on average twice per week)
1257 Computer Sciences and Statistics