Schedule for CSC 252, Spring 2009 (Tentative)

The following is my best guess as to the schedule for this term.  Click on the unit name to see my lecture notes.


Unit Topics Reading Assignments

Overview
     Thur. Jan. 15 Introduction Chapter 1 Get an account and set it up
Data representation
     Tues. Jan. 20 Overview Chapter 2 A1: bit twiddling
     Thur. Jan. 22 Integers A1 trivia due, noon
     Tues. Jan. 27 Floating Point
Assembly-level programs
     Thur. Jan. 29 overview Chapter 3 (skip 3.14–3.15) A1 due midnight yesterday;
A2: the binary bomb
     Tues. Feb. 03 control flow and subroutines A2 trivia due, noon
     Thur. Feb. 05 Field trip: public lecture by William Wulf (Goergen 101)
     Tues. Feb. 10 structured data
Processor architecture
     Thur. Feb. 12 circuits and history Chapter 4 intro; “asides” on RISC/CISC; Section 4.2.5 A2 due midnight yesterday;
A3: the buffer bomb
     Tues. Feb. 17 sequential implementation
(Guest lecture by Kyle Liddell)
Figures 4.20 and 4.21;
Section 4.3.5
A3 trivia due, noon
     Thur. Feb. 19 pipelining Figures 4.30, 4.31, 4.39, 4.52;
Sections 4.4, 4.5.3–4.5.7
     Tues. Feb. 24 modern processors Sections 4.5.11, 4.6, 5.7 A3 due midnight yesterday

     Thur. Feb. 26 Midterm Exam A4: comparing systems

Optimizing performance
     Tues. Mar. 03 the key performance formula;
obstacles to compiling fast code
(rest of) Chapter 5
     Thur. Mar. 05 measuring performance A4 due 11:59pm Friday

      Mar. 10 & 12 UR spring break

The storage hierarchy
     Tues. Mar. 17 storage technology Chapter 6 A5: tuning performance
     Thur. Mar. 19 caching A5 trivia due, noon
     Tues. Mar. 24 performance tuning
Exceptional control flow
     Thur. Mar. 26 exceptions Chapter 8
     Tues. Mar. 31 processes and signals A5 due midnight yesterday;
A6: Unix shell
     Thur. Apr. 02 non-local jumps, linking
skim Chapter 7 A6 trivia due, noon
Measuring time
     Tues. Apr. 07 Chapter 9
Virtual memory
     Thur. Apr. 09 Address translation Chapter 10
     Tues. Apr. 14 Pentium/Linux case study A6 due midnight yesterday
     Thur. Apr. 16 Storage management A7: memory allocation
Concurrency and Networks
     Tues. Apr. 21 Threads and semaphores Selected topics from Chapters 12 and 13 (skim all;  read 13.3–13.6 carefully) A7 trivia due, noon
     Thur. Apr. 23 Cache coherence
     Tues. Apr. 28 Transactional memory
Wrap-up
A7 due 11:59pm Friday

     Sat. May 9 Final Exam 8:30am, CSB 601

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Last Change: 20 April 2009 / Michael Scott's email address