COSC 121

COSC 121 Computer Systems Fundamentals
Spring 2019

Lectures: Tuesday-Thursday 3:30-4:45 pm, Healy 105

Instructor: Nitin Vaidya
Office hours: Wednesday 4:00-5:00 pm (or by appointment) at 358 St. Mary's Hall
nitin.vaidya@georgetown.edu

Teaching assistant: Gregory Wills (gjw13@georgetown.edu)
Office hours: Monday 1:00-3:00, Car Barn 100

Canvas

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Professor Bolton's webpage for this course is at http://jeremybolton.georgetown.domains/courses/cs/. His page lists the textbooks for the course. Please also visit his page for materials related to lectures through Feb. 8, 2019.
Please refer to the Syllabus posted on Prof. Bolton's page for the following: grading policy and academic honesty policy for the course.
MID-TERM EXAM will be on March 14, 2019 (Thursday). Topics covered through February 22 will be included in the scope of the mid-term exam.
FINAL EXAM will be on May 7, 2019 (Tuesday) during 4:00-6:00 pm in room 105 Healy. Final exam schedule and room assignment posted at https://registrar.georgetown.edu/finals/rooms
The scope of the final exam includes topics listed below for lectures from 2/21/2019 till the end of the semester, including Activation Records, and subsequent topics.
Late submission policy is changed on Feb. 12 as follows: For each homework/project, 48 hour extension is granted to all students without penalty and without requiring prior approval. This applies to all homework/projects that are due during the rest of the semester. Homework/project submissions that are late by between 48 and 72 hours will be assessed a penalty of 30% of the maximum score for that homework/project. Submissions late by more than 72 hours will not receive credit.

LECTURE SUMMARIES from Feb. 12, 2019: Section/chapter numbers refer to either those in the book by Patt and Patel [PP] or Patterson and Hennessy [PH].

2/12/2019: Stacks, PUSH and POP operations. Sections 10.1, 10.2 [PP]
slides
2/14/2019: Stacks, user and supervisory stacks, traps and subroutines, activations record. Section 10.1, 10.2, Chapter 14 [PP]
slides
2/21/2019: Activation records. Sections 14.1, 14.2, 14.3 [PP]
Assignment #5
2/26/2019: Compilers. Performance metric (execution time = #instructions * #cycles/instruction * clock period, where clock period = 1/clock frequency)
2/28/2019: [PH] below denotes the book by Patterson & Hennessy listed on Prof. Bolton's website. Next topic for this course is pipelining from [PH]. As background for the discussion on pipelining, we will need to first review the datapath and control for non-pipelined (or "single cycle") processor in [PH] Chapter 4 (Chapter title "The Processor").
Project 4
3/12/2019: Datapath in [PH]
3/14/2019: Mid-term exam
Assignment #6
3/19/2019: Pipelining (from [PH])
3/21/2019: Pipelining
Project 5
3/26/2019: Pipelining. Data hazards. (from [PH])
3/28/2019: Pipelining. Data hazards. Control hazards (due to branch instructions). Cache.
4/2/2019: Cache: Direct mapped, set associative, fully-associative cache.

Reading: Relevant parts of Sections 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.5 in [PH]

Assignment #7
4/4/2019: Cache: Write-back, Write-through.

Reading: Relevant parts of Sections 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.5 in [PH]
4/9/19: Caches
4/11/19: Multiprocessor caches. Hypercube network (see Assignment 8 for a discussion of hypercubes)
Project 6
Assignment #8
4/16/19: Virtual memory [PH Section 5.4]
4/23/19: Virtual memory, Shared memory (consistency models): Algorithms 1 and 2 in these notes (figures referred in the notes)
4/25/19: Shared memory (consistency models): Algorithms 1 and 2 in these notes (figures referred in the notes)
4/30/19: Guest lecture: Prof. Wenchao Zhou (Prof. Zhou's slides): Cloud computing
FINAL EXAM will be on May 7, 2019 (Tuesday) during 4:00-6:00 pm in room 105 Healy. Final exam schedule and room assignment posted at https://registrar.georgetown.edu/finals/rooms
The scope of the final exam includes topics listed above for lectures from 2/21/2019 till the end of the semester, including Activation Records, and subsequent topics. You may bring to the final exam 2 sheets with handwritten notes (writing on both sides is OK). You may NOT bring the textbooks to the exam. You may also bring copies of materials provided above that are NOT from the textbooks.