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ECE 511, Spring 2025

Course Information

Class Lectures

  • Instructor: Rakesh Kumar
  • Time: 2:00-3:20 PM, Tuesdays and Thursdays
  • Location: ECEB 3015
  • Office Hours: 3:25-3:55 PM, Tuesdays and Thursdays, CSL 208

TA

  • Name: Sanjeevi Sengottuvel
  • Office Hours: 3:30 PM-5:30 PM, Wednesdays, ECEB 2022
  • Queue: Link

Course Info and Syllabus

Syllabus can be found here

Course Description

Advanced concepts in computer architecture: design, management, and modeling of memory hierarchies; pipelined computers; and multiple processor systems. Emphasis on hardware alternatives in detail and their relation to system performance and cost. More specifically, assuming knowledge of pipelined processors with cache memories, as studied in depth in ECE 411, we continue with advanced techniques for extracting greater levels of instruction-level parallelism and memory-level parallelism in ECE 511. The former exploits opportunities for parallel execution of instructions from an inherently serial instruction stream, while the latter attempts to overlap increasing memory access latency with other useful work. We will study the memory hierarchy as well as virtual memory and will also cover processor chips with multiple cores, where concurrency is extracted from multiple sequential threads of execution and finally look at emerging technologies. Through this course, students will learn not only the fundamental concepts of computer architecture via the lecture materials, but also the hands-on experience of designing and evaluating architecture techniques via MPs and a course project.

Course Prerequisites

ECE 411 or CS 433, C/C++ Programming, SystemVerilog for Hardware Design

Assignments and Grading

Assignments consist of paper reviews, machine problems (MPs), and a course project. Additionally, there will be a midterm and final exam. The final project can be done in groups, all other assignments must be done individually.

Grading policy
  • Paper reviews (10%)
    • The lowest 2 reviews will be dropped.
  • Machine problems (MPs) (30%)
    • MP1: 10%
    • MP2: 10%
    • MP3: 10%
  • Midterm exam (15%)
  • Final exam (15%)
  • Course project (30%)
    • Project proposal (5%)
    • Progress report (5%)
    • Presentation (6%)
    • Final report (14%)
Paper reviews

Two papers will be assigned for reading before each lecture, some of the papers will be marked as review candidates, you will choose one of the review candidates and write a brief paper review. The readings can be found in the readings page, the readings must be done before lecture, while the reviews are submitted separately at a later deadline.

You must write one paper review per week, they will be due on Canvas at Friday 11:59 PM each week. The two lowest grades from the paper reviews will be dropped at the end of the semester.

The paper review has two parts:

  • A paragraph summarizing the paper explaining the problem statement, main ideas and insight, experiment methodology, and key results (200-250 words)
  • A paragraph critiquing the work, namely the strengths and weaknesses of the paper and suggested improvements or next steps (200-250 words).
Machine problems (MPs)

Machine problems will involve architecture simulators (Gem5) and hardware design (SystemVerilog).