CS/ECE 757 Advanced Computer Architecture II Spring 2008 Section 1 Instructor Mark D. Hill and T. A. Jayaram Bobba URL: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/cs757/Spring2008/

The distant threat has come to pass. For 30 years or more, pundits have claimed that parallel computers are the inexorable next step in the evolution of computers.

--Jim Larus & Ravi Rajwar, Transactional Memory, Morgan & Claypool, Editor Mark Hill, 2007

Motivation

Multicore processors multiplying two ways: in market share and cores per chip. It is now hard to buy a single-core system, even for a laptop. One multicore chip already supports 32 simultaneous threads (Sun Niagara pictured on right). How should we build multicore chips so that they can be programmed? CS 757 will help you understand how multicore and other parallel systems work. We will mix some programming 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.

Instructions for First Lecture (Wed Jan 23)

• Get textbook Hennessy & Patterson AQA 4th Ed.
• Read Olukotun&Hammond Queue05 (must be on-campus to access).
• Skim Course Web Pages.