1. CS-350 Term Project Charles Abzug, Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
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Home Page:
© 2001 Charles Abzug

2. Subject Possibility 1:
Organization and Architecture of a commercially-available computer system
Examples:
Various RISC chips: PowerPC, Sun SPARC, RISC, MIPS
IBM: System 360/370/390, System 36, System 38, RS/6000
Motorola: 6800 and series
Intel: 80xyz and their successors
AMD and Cyrix: competitor chips to the Intel
DEC: PDP-1, PDP-8, PDP-11, PDP-15, VAX, and Alpha
SGI: R10000
Tandem/16, Stratus, and other fault-tolerant and high-availability architectures
CDC, Cray, Thinking Machines, Intel and other supercomputers
Constraint: No more than one group per course section on one system

3. Coverage Registers: General-purpose and special-purpose
Instruction Set
Addressing Modes
Technologies Used
Type: CISC or RISC
Memory map
Speed
Factors Affecting Performance (e.g., pipelining, suprascalar architecture, conditional/speculative execution, etc.)
Perspective on role in the marketplace

4. Critical Concept Each group should focus in on one critical concept.
Each critical concept should be covered by no more than ONE group presenting each course section.
Example concepts:
General issues of performance
Pipelining and Superpipelined architecture
Superscalar architecture
Performance benchmarks (Whetstone, Dhrystone, Linpack, Livermore Kernels, Ziff-Davis)
Conditional Execution and Speculative Execution
Architectural family (e.g., IBM System 360, DEC VAX)
Architectural types: SISD, SIMD, MIMD
RISC as an architectural concept: principal features
Dataflow architectures
Supercomputing

5. Subject Possibility 2: A major computer subsystem: comparative study
Examples:
Secondary storage devices
Buses
Primary Memory
Cache Memory
Device Controllers
Chipsets
Floating Point Processing

6. Subject Possibility 3 A major topic in Computer Architecture Examples:
CISC vs. RISC
Supercomputing
Fault Tolerance/High Availability
Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID)

7. End