Welcome to Advanced Computer Architecture

This class is offered Spring Quarter 2021 as an fully online class at University of California, Davis. This quarter, Professors Akella and Lowe-Power are co-teaching the Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Computer Science versions of this course at the same time.

Class goals

The goal of the course is to go deeper into computer architecture than we typically cover in ECE 270 or CSE 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.

Thus, for the first half of the course, about 5 weeks, we are going to go a deep dive into current topics in computer architecture including Cache coherence and memory consistency, On-chip networks, Memory design, and Virtualization. This section of the course will be reading heavy, required 2+ hours of reading for each lecture.

The second half of the course will focus on the class project. During this time, 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

During the first half of the class, we will have two lectures per week from 12:40-2:30 on Tuesday and Thursday via Zoom. These lectures will be a mixture of small group activities and lectures. We expect that you have read the reading material before class.

Class discussion will take place on Microsoft Teams. You should have been added to this team already, but if you haven’t, be sure to contact Professor Akella or Lowe-Power.

More details on the class structure can be found on the reading list.