Welcome to Parallel Computer Architecture

This class is offered Spring Quarter 2023 at University of California, Davis.

See the syllabus for details on the class policies.

Notes for the course can be found on One Note.

Class discussion is on MS Teams.

Class goals

The goal of the course is to go deeper into computer architecture than we typically cover in ECE 270 or CS 201A. In those course we cover core microarchitecture and caching, but don’t have time to get into the details of multicore architecture or memory system design. We also want to give a flavor of computer architecture research, and give everyone in the class the chance to contribute to a research project.

This course will be reading heavy, expect to spend 1-2 hours of reading for each lecture. Each week will be split between learning about a topic (usually via a Synthesis Lecture in Computer Architecture) and presentations on papers related to the topic. See the reading list for details.

There will also be a project portion of the class. You will split into groups of four to work on a proposal for a research project. You will do two presentations: one on the problem and related work and one on the new idea and preliminary data. Finally, the project will culminate with an NSF-like proposal.

Class structure

There will be two types of classes throughout the quarter, usually one of each type each week: lecture classes and presentation classes. Lecture classes will be like typical lectures. We will go over the reading’s topics and we will discuss questions. Presentation classes will be student-driven presentation on papers related to what we are covering in class. Each presentation day, one person from each group will present on a paper to the class. The paper presentations page has more details on what I am looking for and a strict template for you to follow.

More details on the class structure can be found on the reading list and the paper presentations page.