Syllabus

Course Summary

Use a hardware description language to describe and design digital computing systems. Topics include: processor design, pipelining, cache and storage systems, instruction, thread, and process level parallelism, speculation, and branch prediction.

Course Objectives

By the end of the semester:

• Students will be able to express designs based on classical computer architectural concepts using appropriate engineering tools. (EAC a, b, c, k) (CAC a, c, i)
• Students will be able to explain and apply fundamental architectural principles such as locality, optimizing common cases, and parallelism to modern architecture design. (EAC a, e) (CAC a)

Textbook

The course closely follows parts of the Hennessy and Patterson Computer Architecture textbook (6e). See the schedule for the chapter/sections corresponding to each class. Some students may be successful from the provided materials alone, however, reviewing the indicated sections will significantly deepen your learning.

Required Textbook

• Hennessy and Patterson, “Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach“, 6th Edition. ISBN978-0128119051. The library also has the eBook version available (Bucknell login required).

Recommended Reference Textbooks

• Patterson and Hennessy, “Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface“, 5th Edition. ISBN 978-0124077263. This is the required text for CSCI 206. The eBook is also available (Bucknell login required).
• Samir Palnitkar, “Verilog HDL“, 2nd Edition. ISBN 978-0132599702. One (physical) copy is available at the library. No eBook available.

Attendance and Participation

An important part of the class is your active participation in lecture sections. If people do not come to lecture, come late, or do other work (or sleep) while in lecture, it degrades the quality of the class for everyone. Therefore, all students are expected to attend and actively participate in all lectures. If you have to miss class for job interviews, athletics, etc, please contact the instructor at least 24 hours prior to the start of that class. If you are unable to come to class due to illness or an urgent emergency, let me know when you can. You will be responsible for making up any/all missed work. If you miss a graded activity/quiz without prior notice, you will receive a grade of zero for that activity.

In-Class Activities

Most classes will include some sort of activity. Many times you will have time to complete the activity in class. If you do not complete an activity in class, it is your homework and is due on the assigned due date. If there is no date, assume it’s due at the beginning of the next class. Activities will make up the majority of your Quizzes, Activities, Participation grade. It is your responsibility to complete the activities and submit them on Google classroom or to turn in a paper copy before the due date.

Lab & Project Work

This course has several multi-week lab projects that complement the lecture material. Some labs are individual assignments while others are group assignments. This will be clearly indicated in the lab. Groups will be determined and you will be expected to work with your group.

The lab projects are an important part of the course and worth 40% of the overall course grade.

Late Work

Late work is not accepted unless you receive permission from the instructor ideally >24 hours before it is due.

Grading

Your instructor will make every effort to promptly return all graded work to you (usually by the next scheduled class). Projects and larger assignments will take longer (typically 1 week).  All grades will be published on Moodle. If you think you find a grading error, you may request a regrade. Regrade requests must be received no later than 72 hours after the assignment/exam is returned. It is possible for the new grade to be lower than the original grade. In all cases, the most recent grade is used (not the highest grade). If you would like to discuss your grade at any time, please contact me for a meeting.

The grade distribution of the components of the course is shown below. Students must pass all bold items marked with a * to pass the course (separately).

The standard grading scale (below) is used to assign letter grades.

Bucknell University Honor Code

Expectations for Academic Engagement

Courses at Bucknell that receive one unit of academic credit have a minimum expectation of 12 hours per week of student academic engagement. Student academic engagement includes both the hours of direct faculty instruction (or its equivalent) and the hours spent on out-of-class student work.

Source: Bucknell University Academic Policies and Requirements

Access Statement

Any student who may need an accommodation based on the impact of a disability should contact Heather Fowler, Director of the Office of Accessibility Resources at 570-577-1188 or hf007@bucknell.edu who will help coordinate reasonable accommodations for those students with documented disabilities.