CS 490M: Multicore Architecture

Spring 2008


Instructor : Professor Zhiyuan Li

Lecture Schedule:  TTh 12:00-1:15pm Jan 7 - Apr 27, 2008

Lab Schedule:   See School Update

Home page of the course: 

Students will access course materials (course policies, lecture notes, grades, assignments, etc) through   Purdue's WebCT

What Does This Course Cover?

As multicore becomes the dominant microprocessor architecture for the forseeable future, it is important for future computing scientists and engineers to become familiar with the fundamental concepts, new features and liminations of such architecture. It is also critical to understand the impact of multicore architecture on designs of computer applications, computing algorithms, and software.

CS490M, a seminar course for upper level undergraduate students, will begin by an introduction to the fundamental concepts of multicore architectures, including The newest multicore microprocessors will be used as examples to illustrate these concepts. The course will then proceed to study current programming models and performance evaluation tools which which target multicore architectures.

To give students some hands-on experience, we will let them examine a few multimedia applications , e.g. MPEG software and sound recording/editing software, as test programs and explore potential ways to enhance the performance of such software by utilizing efficient parallel tasks. This effort will be conducted in groups.

Towards the second half of the semester, the course will become increasingly more interactive, with increased participation from the students as investigators and reviewers of the state of the art (i.e. reading and presenting recent research results on related subjects), as well as investigators of real systems and software reporting their experience from the experiments with the multimedia software.

We will use the multicore machines donated by the Intel for the group projects.

Pre-requisite

CS250

Grading of CS490M

Students are encouraged to open their mind and focus on learning and experimenting with new ideas. Hence the grading for the course will roughly following this scheme: