1 CS/ECE 354 Fall 2013 “New, and improved!”

2 Karen Miller Phone: CS

3 Karen's Background  BS EECS at Berkeley  Worked at Astronautics Corp of America, designing the ZS1 (mini super computer); hardware design (memory system)  MS CS here at the UW  Teaching ever since... taught this class more than 30 times!  Also, technical writing for the HTCondor project

4 Course Goals  To learn about computer architecture  To see more of the big picture of how computers work, in terms of both their hardware and their software  To become a C programmer  To be introduced to many aspects of operating systems

5 Course Grades  Standard UW scale: A, AB, B, BC...  Approximately 90% and above will be an A  Course grade based on:  30% assignments  35% exam 1 Wednesday Oct 23 at 5:30pm  35% exam 2 Friday Dec 20 at 2:45pm

6 Lots of students can earn an A.

7 Within the Schedule, on the course web page:  Dates  Topics the subject and (sometimes) lecture slides  Readings Textbook, and sometimes topics written by Karen or others  On Your Own you are responsible for learning these topics, but they will not be covered in lecture  Beyond 354 material that may be of interest, but not part of the course curriculum  Due Dates

8 Lecture Slides, when provided  reduce note taking time  are incomplete  do not substitute for attending lecture

9 Assignments 4 or 5 graded assignments  Most assignments are programs  Work alone or in a pair (2 people)  Grading will be picky. Karen's advice: start assignments early

10  Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective, by Bryant and O’Hallaron, second edition  And, obtain a reference manual for programming in C. Online references might be enough, but some day you will likely want your own reference manual. Preferred book: The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie second edition

11 Getting your A  Come to class you are responsible for all class material  Know the prerequisite material  Learn the online On Your Own material  Make friends, form a study group  Do the assignments (!)  Use all your resources: your lecture notes online readings ask questions in office hours and by appointment (Karen's and TAs')

12 Ordered Course Topics  A common HLL: C  X86 assembly language  arrays, stacks, and queues  Implementing functions  Secrets of I/O, including exception handling (interrupts and traps)  Computer performance  Memory hierarchies and caching  Virtual memory  Internet and network programming (time dependent)