COMPUTER ORGANIZATION
Monday/Wednesday 15:25pm — 16:40pm
Wegmans Hall Room 1400
Office Hour Zoom Link: https://rochester.zoom.us/j/98043895585
Instructor: Yanan Guo
Course Description

CSC 252/452 will not be easy, but will be a rare enlightenment and give you unique thrills.

In CSC 172 you learned how to write programs in languages that humans can understand (e.g., Java). CSC 252/452 will teach you how human-readable programs actually run on a computer. We will explain how to transform a human-readable program to a computer-understandable program, how the computer-understandable program is organized and interfaced with the underlying hardware processor, and how to design hardware processors that can execute programs as fast, safe, and efficient as possible.

Ultimately, our objective is to remove a good deal of the mystery of how modern computers work. There is NO magic. Even if you decide not to be a computer system designer in future, knowing these will empower you to get the computer to do useful work for you. In that vein, we will start at the bottom and work our way up. In every case, when we cover a sophisticated topic, we will try to tie it to what you already know. In this way, you don't have to memorize because everything you will learn next will be built on top of what you have already learned. We expect you to come out of this course not only knowing how modern computers work, having a deeper understanding of why they work as they are, but more importantly, why computers don't have to be built that way!

Instructor and TAs
Yanan Guo (Instructor)
Email: [yanan.guo at rochester.edu]
Office hours: Thursday 11am-12pm
Wegmans Hall 3403
 
Jingyu Qiu (Graduate TA)
Email: [jqiu9 at ur.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Monday 5pm-6pm
Wegmans Hall 2215
 
Mengqi Zhang (Graduate TA)
Email: [mzhang93 at ur.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Thursday 9am-10am
Wegmans Hall 2203
 
Jack Cashman (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [jcashman at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Monday 1:30pm-2:30pm
Wegmans Hall 2215
 
Jiaqi Nie (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [jnie7 at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Friday 3pm-4pm
Wegmans Hall 3307
 
Chenrui Wang (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [cwang111 at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Thursday 5pm-6pm
Wegmans Hall 3307
 
Xingzhi Ye (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [xye8 at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Wednesday 10am-11am
Wegmans Hall 2215
 
Boyi Zhang (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [bzhang44 at ur.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Friday 2pm-3pm
Wegmans Hall 3307
 
Yiling Zou (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [yzou17 at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Tuesday 11am-12pm
Wegmans Hall 2215