• 11/30 : Final exam is held Wednesday, Dec 7 at 1:30 - 4:15PM.
• 11/15 : Asg 2 help: cache size, block size and associativity may be assumed to be a power of two. Prefer that any cache is handled dynamically, but if needed, students may assume at most 4*1024*1024 = 4194304 blocks in cache.
• 10/27 : Exam #2 on Wednesday (11/2). Assignment 2 resubmission due Monday by noon.
• 10/03 : Announcement that an open-book assignment will probably be given and completed in class on Friday 10/07/05. The assignment will be open book, and require the student to fill in a Tomasulo's timing table as we have done in class (i.e., a table like that shown on slide 41, but possibily multi-issue).
• 9/23 : Assignment due date moved to Monday 9/26 (before class). If handed in by Wednesday before class, will be graded with -10 for being late. Any assignments not handed in by then are graded as 0.
• 9/14 : Appendix A lecture finished, first exam confirmed for Monday 9/19. Next week's recitations will not have quizzes.
• 9/09 : First asg given, first exam tentatively scheduled for Monday, 9/19. Exam date may change based on lecture progress. Exam will cover Chapter 1 and Appendix A.
• 8/31 : No classes Monday Sep 5 (Labor day), so M recitation should go to W recitation instead.
• 8/26 : No recitation second week (7/29 & 7/30).
• 7/22 : First day of class is Wednesday 7/24 (come to class prepared to take notes).
• 7/22 : No recitation this week (7/22 - 7/26).

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

1. Ch 1: Terminology and trends in Computer Architecture; how to measure computer performance and predict optimization gains, etc.
2. App A: Understanding pipelining. In particular, speedups and slowdowns from it, how to handle hazards in the pipe, handling interrupts with varying length instructions, etc.
3. Ch 3: Instruction level parallelism via multi-issue, dynamic scheduling (Tomasulo's Algorithm) , branch prediction, superscalar and VLIW design and speculation.
4. Ch 4: Transformations to enhance ILP: scheduling, loop unrolling dependence ameliorating techniques, software pipelining. Further info on superscalar and VLIW designs.
5. Ch 5: Modern memory heirarchy and its affect on program execution. We will also discuss transformations to exploit this heirarchy.

If time allows, we will also cover chapters 2 (ISA design), 6 (multiprocessing) and 7 (I/O).

• CS 2733 Computer Organization II
• CS 3733 Operating Systems

• 55-60% From three major exams.
• 30-40% from various projects.
• 5-10% class participation/quizzes.

For a more complete description, consult the syllabus.

There is also a recitation that goes with this course: Rec Hours : M or W 12-12:50PM.
Location : SB 1.02.04.
Instructor: TBA.
NOTE : There is no recitation for the first week (Aug 22-26).

Students with disabilities:
If you have a physical, psychological, medical or learning disability that may impact on your ability to carry out assigned course work, I would urge that you contact University Disability Services (DS), Multidisciplinary Studies Building, Room 2.03.18, 210-458-4157 (Voice), 210-458-4981 (TTY), 210-458-4980 (Fax), homepage: http://www.utsa.edu/disability/. Please bring a letter to me from the DS indicating your need for academic accommodations within the first week of class. The syllabus and other class materials can be made available in alternative format upon request.

Academic Integrity:
Remember that the goal of programming or written assignments is to enhance your programming skills and understanding of the topics under discussion. Thus indulging in academic dishonesty results in poor understanding of the material as well as being unfair to other students. In case you have any questions about whether an act of collaboration may be construed as academic dishonesty, please clarify the issue with the instructor before you collaborate. Academic dishonesty can result in a grade of 'F'.

• It is understandable that discussing a problem with other people may lead to more insight into the issues involved. Thus discussing a problem in assignments/homeworks in a general way with other people is fine. However, discussing the solutions to the problem or showing/examining actual code is NOT acceptable.
• Every student must write his/her own code and homework. Showing your code or homework to members of other teams, giving it to them, or making it accessible to them (e.g., by making the files world-readable) is academic dishonesty.
• You are responsible for ensuring that your code/documentation/results are adequately protected and not accessible to other teams. Change permissions of your working directory to 0700 ('chmod 0700 <directory>).
• Consulting code from a textbook, or from the Internet, in order to understand specific aspects of your assignment is fine. However, copying entire code or large parts of such code will be considered academic dishonesty. If you borrow small parts of code from these sources, you must acknowledge this in your submission and additionally you must clearly understand and be able to explain how the code works. If you cannot explain your own code in detail, it will be graded as zero.