1. Computer Engineering Department Islamic University of Gaza ECOM 6301
Advanced Computer Architectures
Graduate Course
Fall
Prof. Dr. Eng. Mohammad A. Mikki
Computer Engineering Department Chair
College of Engineering
Islamic Universoity of Gaza, Gaza, Palestine
Homepage:
Tel.: Ext. 2883

2. Syllabus & Course Overview
Lecture 1
Syllabus & Course Overview

3. Instructor’s Info. Prof. Dr. Eng. Mohammad A. Mikki
Computer Engineering Department Chair
College of Engineering
Islamic Universoity of Gaza, Gaza, Palestine
Homepage:
Tel.: Ext. 2883
Skype ID: Mohammad.mikki

4. Where to find me
Admin. Building
Room B323

5. Office Hours
TBA
and by Appointment

6. Teaching Assistants
None

7. Course Information
Course Code: ECOM 6301 Course Name: Advanced Computer Architectures (Graduate Course) Number of credits: 3

8. Course Description
Computer systems are at a critical juncture. Parallel computing is now ubiquitous across all domains, from cellphones to multicore chips and supercomputers. But simply scaling the number of cores will soon run out of steam, so architectures are also becoming heterogeneous to handle specific types of computation more efficiently (e.g., GPUs). These techniques improve performance at the cost of programmability and generality. How can we strike the right balance between efficiency, generality, and ease of use?  ECOM 6301 will help you understand, use, and design these emerging parallel and heterogeneous systems. Through a mix of lectures and paper discussions, we will learn how modern systems work and review recent research in the area. We will cover both hardware and software aspects, ranging from computer architecture to programming models, with the holistic view that successful approaches need to consider both hardware and software. Topics include:
The interaction between programming models, architecture and VLSI
Traditional and high-productivity parallel programming models
Shared memory and message-passing communication
Parallel memory hierarchies, including caching, coherence and consistency, fine-grain synchronization, and transactional memory
GPUs, FPGAs, domain-specific accelerators, and single-purpose architectures
The goal of this course is to provide a deep understanding of the fundamental principles and engineering trade-offs involved in designing modern parallel computing systems as well as to teach parallel programming techniques necessary to effectively utilize these machines.

9. Tentative List of Topics
Topical Outline
Pipelines
review basic principles, hazards, dependencies
Data hazards, scoreboards, Tomasulo algorithm
control hazards, branch prediction techniques
multiple instruction issue
compiler support
speculative execution
performance evaluation
Parallel Computers
taxonomy of parallel architectures, parallel applications
synchronization mechanisms
bus based cache coherence protocols
directory based cache coherence protocols
memory consistency models, relaxed consistency models
interconnection networks, bi-section bandwidth, topologies
networked workstation cluster computers

10. Course Objectives
Students who successfully complete this course will understand basic principles and practices in
PCA, emphasizing both hardware and software challenges and their interactions, as well as
exposure to research challenges in this field, through class lectures and discussions, reading
assignments, homework exercises, a major research project, and exams.

11. Course Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course, students should be able to understand:
The Technical and Business motivation and need for current state-of-the-art computing systems to incorporate Parallel Processing into the Hardware and Software Subsystems.
The Micro-Hardware Architectural Evolutionary Trends leading to on-chip Instruction-Level Parallelism, and Pipelining, SuperScalar, Multi-Function Unit Parallel Processing.
The Macro-Hardware Architectural Evolutionary Trends leading to Parallel Processing including Flynn’s Taxonomy and the recent progression in high-performance supercomputing architectures from Clusters to Grids and to Clouds.
Data dependency analysis and hazards which, along with Amdahl’s Law, limits the amount of practical speedup and scalability that can be achieved with Parallel Processing.
Design and Analysis Techniques for Parallel Processing Systems including the identification of data vs. task partitioning in algorithms and applications.
The Different Models for implementing parallelism in Computing Systems such as shared memory and message passing.
The software challenges associated with Parallel Processing including the difference between concurrent vs. parallel execution models, deadlocks and race conditions.
A sample of current parallel programming paradigms and languages and be able to write parallel programs using them.

12. Prerequisites
You should have a good understanding of basic computer architecture. Prior knowledge of parallel programming and performance optimization will be helpful, but is not required.
Introuction to Computer Systems is a strict prerequisite for this course. This includes memory hierarchies, memory management, basic networking, etc. While Introduction to Computer Architecture would be helpful for understanding the material in this course, it is not a prerequisite.
This is a core Master’s degree course

13. Course Website The common syllabus is posted on the course webpage at
and
My homepage   
Please check this webpage at least once a week for:
lecture notes
Assignments and solutions
Exams and solutions
Quizzes and solutions
Useful links
Supplementary material, and
Announcements
Your instructor will provide and/or post a revised version of the course syllabus with additional information stating his policies for the course, such as attendance policy, labs and assignments submission policy, quizzes policy, and others.

14. Class Information 101 Section Sat. Days 14:00 – 17:00 Time I418
Location

15. Required Textbook and Material
[1] Computer Organization and Design
T H E H A R D W A R E / S O F T W A R E I N T E R F A C E, David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy, 5th Edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 2014
[2] Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach, John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson. Fifth Edition
[3] Reading papers

16. Recommended Books/Additional References
Multi-Core Programming, Shameem Akhter and Jason Roberts, 2006, Intel Press, ISBN
Using OpenMP, Barbara Chapman and Gabriele Jost, 2008, MIT Press, ISBN
Scientific Parallel Computing, Ridgway Scott and Terry Clark, 2005, Princeton University Press, ISBN X
A. Grama, A. Gupta, G. Karypis, and V. Kumar, Introduction to Parallel Computing, 2nd Edition, Pearson: Addison-Wesley, Errata is available by John Kirk.
D. Culler and J. Singh, Parallel Computer Architecture: A Hardware/Software Approach, Morgan Kaufmann, 1999.
P. Pacheco, An Introduction to Parallel Programming, Morgan Kaufmann, 2011.
B. Gaster, L. Howes, D. Kaeli, P. Mistry, and D. Schaa, Heterogeneous Computing with OpenCL, Morgan Kaufmann, 2011.
T. El-Ghazawi, W. Carlson, T. Sterling, and K. Yelik, UPC: Distributed Shared Memory Programming, Wiley, 2005.
R. Bisseling, Parallel Scientific Computation: A Structured Approach using BSP and MPI, Oxford Univ. Press, 2004.
Jack Dongarra et al., Sourcebook of Parallel Computing, Morgan Kaufman Publishers, San Francisco, CA, 2003

17. Class Expectations Class attendance Text reading in advance
Class participation
Working hard

18. Class Schedule Week/Date Topic Textbook/Reading Material Presentor
Assignment 1
Sat. 15.Sep.
Introduction
Syllabus
Course Overview
Introduction to course research project
Instructor
Students read Ch1 of both Patterson’s textbooks 2
Sat. 22.Sep.
Introduction (Cont.)
Chapter 1 ( ) of Computer Organization and Design by Hennessy and Patterson 3
Sat. 29.Sep.
Chapter 1 ( ) of Computer Architecture a Quantitative Approach by Hennessy and Patterson 4
Moore’s Law
Moores Law a Department of Defense Perspective, Gerald M. Borsuk, 2003 (Paper)
Moore’s Law, Ramesh Kumar, Priye Ranjan, and Dipesh Das 2016 (Paper)
Moore’s law, unknown author (Paper)
Quiz1 on Introduction
Project proposal submission 5
Sat. 06.Oct.
Amdahl's Law
Section1.9 of Computer Architecture a Quantitative Approach by Hennessy and Patterson
The Performance of Parallel Algorithms by Amdahl's Law, Gustafson's Trend, Juby Mathew, and R Vijayakumar, 2011 (paper)

19. Class Schedule Week/Date Topic Textbook/Reading Material Assignment 6
Sat. 13.Oct.
The Processor
Chapter 4 ( ) of Computer Organization and Design by Hennessy and Patterson
Itanium Processor microarchitecture, Harsh Sharangpani, and Ken Arora (paper)
Students
Quiz2 on Moore’s law and Amdahl’s law
Read Ch4 7
Sat. 20.Oct.
Instruction level parallelism and its exploitation
Chapter 3 of Computer Architecture a Quantitative Approach by Hennessy and Patterson
Quiz3 on “The processor”
Read Ch3 8
Sat. 27.Oct.
Parallel Computer Architectures Taxonomy
Ch6 of Computer Organization and Design by Hennessy and Patterson
Classification of Designs (paper)
parallel Computers Classification (Paper)
Quiz4 on ILP
Read Ch6
Submit first project report 9
Sat. 03.Nov.
SIMD- Vector Processors
Architecture of SIMD Type Vector Processor, Mohammad Suaib, et.al., 2011 (Paper)
A Comparative Analysis of SIMD and MIMD Architectures, Mandeep Kaur and Rajdeep Kaur , 2013 (Paper)
Quiz5 on Taxonomy 10
Sat. 10.Nov.
Midterm exams- No classes 11
Sat. 17.Nov.
SIMD- GPUs
History and evolution of GPU architecture, 2010 (Paper)
How GPUs Work (Paper)
The GPU computing Era, 2010 (Paper)
Submit second project report

20. Class Schedule Week/Date Topic Textbook/Reading Material Assignment 12
Sat. 24.Nov.
MIMD
Chapter 5 ( ) of Computer Architecture a Quantitative Approach by Hennessy and Patterson
Students
Quiz6 on SIMD
Read Ch5 13
Sat. 01.Dec.
MIMD (Cont.)
Cont. 14
Sat. 08.Dec.
Shared memory consistency and coherence
Section 5.6 of Computer Architecture a Quantitative Approach by Hennessy and Patterson
Multiprocessors should support simple memory consistency models, Mark D. Hill, 1998 (Paper)
Quiz7 on MIMD

21. Class Schedule Week/Date Topic Textbook/Reading Material Assignment 15
Sat. 15.Dec.
Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing – Research Issues, Challenges, Architecture, Platforms and Applications: A Survey, Dec. 2012
Cloud Computing- An Overview of Cloud Computing Technology
Ch2 of Cloud Computing and Computer Clouds. 2012
CLOUD COMPUTING AN OVERVIEW
Cloud Computing: Overview & Current Research Challenges
Cloud Computing- loud Computing Overview Services and Features- 2014
Cloud-Computing An Overview
Students
Submit final project report 16
Sat. 22.Dec.
Research project papers presentations
Quiz8 on Cloud computing 17
Sat. 29.Dec.
Review 18
Sat. 05.Jan.
First day of final exams

22. Assessment (Grading) Criteria
Class participation: To facilitate a fruitful exchange, students are expected to engage in class discussion. Although we will not be formally tracking attendance, we expect regular attendance and participation.
Attendance and participation
10%
Quizzes
20%
Course Project
30%
Paper Presentations
Final exam

23. Attendance
Class attendance is required and very important for successful completion of the course. Students are expected to attend and participate in every class which is interpreted as the entire class period and lab period. Excused absences must be planned for, when possible, and justified with documentation. The student is responsible for making up missed class/lab sessions. Late arrival that causes disruption, early departure that causes disruption, excessive conversation among students, and other actions that disrupt the classroom are unacceptable.

24. Research Project
Over the last six weeks of the course, students will propose and complete a self-selected final project. By default, the final project will be performed in groups of two. Each team will present the project during a poster session (held during the normal final exam time) and produce a detailed write-up describing their work and results. A major research project will be assigned in order to explore fundamental issues in parallel
computer architectures, systems, and applications. This project will span most of the semester and provide students the opportunity to more deeply explore fundamental issues in PCA. Students will form small teams (one or two person) to propose and then conduct an experimental research project on a topic in PCA of their choosing (subject to professor approval). Each project will involve elements of both hardware and software in parallel computing, although the balance need not necessarily be a split. The culmination of each project will be a clear and concise technical report suitable for potential publication discussing project concepts, development, experiments, results, and analyses. The most important outcome of each project will be the research results that are achieved, analyses rendered, and conclusions drawn with demonstrable insight.

25. Paper Presentations
Each student will be required to give a presentation in the last regular week of class. These presentations should be done in groups of 2-3 students. Each group will have approximately 15 minutes to present on a security topic of their choice (the exact amount of time will be specified once groups are established). As specified in the syllabus, this presentation is worth 10% of your course grade.
Your presentation may be on any topic related to the class, but must not be a duplication of material covered in lecture or lab. Examples of good topics are specific types of attacks not discussed in lecture, specific recent attacks that have taken place, and sepcific security technologies not covered in lab. Topics and groups must be ed to the instructor, with a subject line including "CIS458", by Nov 10.
Each student must contribute to the development of your presentation and speak during the presentation. 20% of the presentation grade will be based on your visuals aids. This does not mean you need a powerpoint slide show, but you may use one if you would like. If your presentation consists of you reading the text off of your visual aid, you will lose some points in this category. 30% of your grade will be based on presentation skills. This will be evenly divided between organization, timing (do not go over your group's time) and communication skills. 50% of the grade will be based on on depth and accuracy of technical content. Your audience is students who have taken this class. Therefore, do not spend more than a minute or two on material already covered in class. However, also do not assume security knowledge beyond what has been covered in class. Each group member will be graded individually on visuals and presentation skills, and as a group on technical content.

26. Use of Laptops/Mobile Phones
Use of laptops/Mobile phones during the class is not allowed. In order to minimize the level of distraction, all mobile phones must be on mute mode during class meeting times.

27. Questions ?