Instructor

Gustavo Rodriguez-Rivera, LWSN 1169. Available any time for short questions, or make an appointment.

Class Homepage

An updated syllabus, class handouts, lecture notes, and other information can be found at:

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/cs250

Goal

After successfully completing this course:

• You will understand the fundamentals of digital logic.
• You will understand the family of processors, assembly language and programming.
• You will understand how computer memory works, types of memory and addressing.
• You will understand parallelism, I/O, pipelining and performance bottlenecks due to hardware.

Course Organization

The course is organized in lecture sessions and help sessions (PSOs). You are encouraged to attend the PSOs every week since the instructors will explain details of the class projects and also answer questions.

Grade Distribution

The final grade will be about 25% midterm exam, 25% final exam, and 50% projects and homeworks.

Syllabus

1. Taste of Digital Logic and Data Representations.
2. Types of Processors. Instruction Sets and Operands. Assembly languages and programming.
3. Memory. Storage Mechanisms. Physical and Virtual Memory. Caching.
4. Input/Output. Devices and Interfaces. Buses and Address Spaces. Role of Device Drivers.
5. Advanced topics. Parallelism and Parallel Computers. Pipelining. Performance and performance assesment. Architectural hierarchy.