COEN 6741 - Computer Architecture and Design

The course focuses on hardware design issues of high-performance computer. The course begins with a review of basic computer architecture design. Students then learn about fundamentals of quantitative design and analysis, instruction set principles, and memory hierarchy, including cache memory, cache optimization and virtual memory. Thereafter, instruction pipelining and advanced notions of instruction-level parallelism such as dynamic scheduling, branch prediction, superscalar and Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) are discussed. Subsequently, students explore other means of modern day and future high-performance computing technology, including data-level parallelism, Graphics Processing Units (GPU) architectures, Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) architectures, vector processors, thread-level parallelism, multicore processors and multiprocessor systems. Practical cases studies for each of the above techniques are discussed based on commercial processors. A project is required.

Prerequisite

Basic knowledge in Computer organization, Digital circuit design, High-level language programming, e.g. C or Java, and Assembly programming, e.g. Intelx86, MIPS or ARM. Besides, knowledge of the VHDL or Verilog HDL is required for the course project.

Book:

John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson, Elsevier. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (6th Ed.). Cambridge, MA : Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, [2019]

Registration Information:

Concordia students must register for this course in their Student Hub. It is strongly recommended that they consult Concordia's class schedule prior to enrolling in order to be aware of any registration restrictions (see the notes). Once registered, students must then sign up for an eConcordia account to access the course material. » Visit the registration section for details.

COURSE OUTLINE

Disclaimer: Information regarding the eConcordia course found on this page may change without notice. For the most recent course list, visit the Student Hub. Furthermore, if this represents the initial offering of the course, no course outline will be available until the start of the first active semester.