This course will cover tools and methodologies for Computer Architecture research including modern simulators, benchmarks for single/multi-cores and clusters. We will study recent papers on the area and how they model pipelines, caches, execution engines, power evaluation, etc.

The recommended bibliography contains:

• Processor Microarchitecture: An Implementation Perspective. Antonio González, Fernando Latorre and Grigorios Magklis. Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture. Morgan && Claypool Publishers.
• Recent papers from Top Conferences

Written exam: 40% of final grade.

Projects: 60% of final grade.

Any unethical behavior related to the evaluation process will result in failing the course with the lowest possible grade. Every assignment is an individual assignment unless otherwise mentioned. Students are not expected to talk to each other about solutions to the assignments unless otherwise mentioned.

I will provide 1h of office hour after each class. If you need more or alternative time, feel free to schedule by email.

Project 1

Description: Count the number of instructions in each SPEC 2006 benchmark programs execution.

Tools required: PIN and SPEC 2006.

Questions to think and answer: Is there any variation? How long should it take? How long did it take?

Do something else with this infrastructure. Show me that you have learned how to use PIN (create a pintool).

Deadline: October, 2nd. Oral presentation.

Project 2

Description: Execute one program from PARSEC in one selected machine, measure the execution time and energy consumption. Use McPAT to find a better hardware configuration to run the same program. You will need to consider OOO and cache configurations.

Tools suggested: McPAT, dinero, PIN, PARSEC

Deadline: November, 6th. Oral presentation.

Practice tasks

Beside the projects, there are practice tasks that will help students to improve their understanding about the tools. I plan to have one such task per week.