Schedule (Tentative)

The following is my best guess as to the schedule for this term. Slide decks will be available shortly after each lecture.

Date Topics Reading Assignments
Overview
     Thur. Jan. 16 Introduction Chapter 1 Get an account and set it up;
Data Representation
     Tues. Jan. 21 Binary and Integers Chapter 2 A1: datalab (bit twiddling) out;
     Thur. Jan. 23 Integers
     Tues. Jan. 28 Floating Point
Assembly-level Programs
     Thur. Jan. 30 Overview Chapter 3 A1 due midnight tomorrow;
A2: the binary bomb out;
     Tues. Feb. 4 Data Movement, Compute, and Control Instructions
     Thur. Feb. 6 Control Instructions
     Tues. Feb. 11 Functions
     Thur. Feb. 13 Data Structures, Buffer Overflow A2 due midnight tomorrow;
A3: the buffer bomb out;
Processor Architecture
     Tues. Feb. 18 ISA, Instruction Encoding Chapter 4 intro; “asides” on RISC/CISC; Section 4.2
     Thur. Feb. 20 Circuits Skim Figures 4.22 and 4.23;
Section 4.3
     Tues. Feb. 25 Circuits, Single-cycle Implementation (by Prof. Sandhya Dwarkadas) Skim Figures 4.40, 4.41, 4.52;
Sections 4.4, 4.5
     Thurs. Feb. 27 Single-Cycle Implementation, Pipelining (by Prof. Sandhya Dwarkadas) Sections 4.5.13, 4.6, 5.7 A3 due midnight tomorrow;
     Tues. Mar. 3 (Advanced) Pipelining
     Thur. Mar. 5 Midterm Exam
     Mar. 10 & 12 UR Spring Break
     Mar. 17 & 19 Extended UR Spring Break
     Tues. Mar. 24 Code Optimizations, Memory Hierarchy Chapter 5; Chapter 6.1.1 and 6.1.4; skim 6.1.2 and 6.1.3;
The Storage Hierarchy
     Thur. Mar. 26 Caching Chapter 6.2, 6.3; study 6.4 carefully
     Tues. Mar. 31 Caching (cont.) Chapter 6.5, 6.6
Exceptional Control Flow
     Thur. Apr. 2 Interrupts, Exceptions, and Processes Chapter 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 A4: Unix shell out;
     Tues. Apr. 7 Processes
Chapter 8.4
     Thur. Apr. 9 Signals
Chapter 8.5
Virtual Memory
     Tues. Apr. 14 Address Translation Chapter 9.1 ~ 9.6
     Thur. Apr. 16 Advanced Address Translation Chapter 9.6, 9.7 A4 due midnight tomorrow;
A5: memory allocation out;
     Tues. Apr. 21 Memory Management Chapter 9.8, 9.9
     Thur. Apr. 23 Advanced Memory Management Chapters 9.8, 9.9, 9.10
     Tues. Apr. 28 Victory Lap A5 due midnight May 4;
     Wed. May 6 Final Exam 19:15, WH 1400