ADVANCED COMPUTER ARCHITECTURES

ING-INF/05 - 6 CFU - 2° Semester

Teaching Staff

GIUSEPPE ASCIA


Learning Objectives

The Course objectives are the understanding by students of the major concepts of advanced architectures of microprocessors, the knowledge of the problems and solutions related to the execution of applications., the knowledge of hardware and software optimization methodologies, the understanding of the areas of application of different forms of parallelism (instruction-level, data-level, thread-level).

The knowledge gained by the student are used for evaluating the performance of modern microprocessor systems, to exploit the various forms of application parallelism in relation to the characteristics of the different architectures and to propose possible optimizations.


Course Structure

The course will be organized in lectures and exercises.



Detailed Course Content

1) Basic Computer Architecture:

Pipelined processors (problems and solutions, implementation)

Branch prediction

Exceptions with pipelined execution)

The memory hierarchy and its implementation.

2) Instruction level parallelism

Static and dynamic scheduling.

Hardware-based Speculation, Multi-issue execution. Superscalar architectures: principles and problems.

VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) architectures, examples of architectures families.

3) Data-level parallelism

Vector processors.

SIMD extensions.

Graphics processors, GPGPU

4) Multiprocessors and thread level parallelism

Taxonomy, topologies, communication management, memory management.

Cache coherence protocols, examples of architectures



Textbook Information

[T1] Hennessy & Patterson: Computer architecture, a quantitative approach (Morgan Kaufmann eds.) 5 ed.

[T2] Patterson & Hennessy: “Struttura e progetto dei calcolatori”. Zanichelli 4. Ed




Open in PDF format Versione in italiano