Spring 2006: CS/EE 7810 Advanced Computer Architecture

General Information:

Overview:

CS 7810 is a graduate course intended for graduate and advanced undergraduate students interested in exploring important issues in the design of modern microprocessors. This course picks up where CS6810 leaves off, with an in-depth treatment of hot research topics in the field. Each week, we will cover 2-3 seminal papers that advanced the state-of-the-art in the past decade. Students will be expected to quickly skim the paper before class and respond to a short questionnaire (this should typically take less than an hour). Students taking the course for credit will have to complete a project, in teams of 1-3.

Grading

The following is a tentative guideline and may undergo changes. 50% of the course grade will depend on the project. This will involve the use of architectural simulators to evaluate and analyze novel research ideas. Students doing a good job on this will be encouraged to submit their papers to one of the ISCA workshops (May deadlines).

A take-home final exam will account for 20% of your grade. 5% will be based on class participation. The remaining 25% will be based on your responses to the questionnaires at the start of each lecture. The questionnaire will test your ability to think critically about the problem at hand.

List of Topics

The following is a tentative list of topics. This may undergo changes depending on student interests. In Spring 2004, we covered the list of papers at the bottom. This year's list will be quite different.

Class Schedule