Schedule for CSC 252, Spring 2007 (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. 18 Introduction Chapter 1 Get an account and set it up
Data representation
     Tues. Jan. 23 Overview Chapter 2 A1: bit twiddling
     Thur. Jan. 25 Integers A1 trivia due, noon
     Tues. Jan. 30 Floating Point
Assembly-level programs
     Thur. Feb. 01 overview Chapter 3 (skip 3.14-3.15) A1 due midnight yesterday;
A2: the binary bomb
     Tues. Feb. 06 control flow A2 trivia due, noon
     Thur. Feb. 08 subroutines
     Tues. Feb. 13 structured data
Processor architecture
     Thur. Feb. 15 circuits and history Chapter 4 intro; “asides” on RISC/CISC; Section 4.2.5 A2 due midnight yesterday;
A3: the buffer bomb
     Tues. Feb. 20 sequential implementation Figures 4.20 and 4.21;
Section 4.3.5
A3 trivia due, noon
     Thur. Feb. 22 pipelining Figures 4.30, 4.31, 4.39, 4.52;
Sections 4.4, 4.5.3–4.5.7
     Tues. Feb. 27 modern processors Sections 4.5.11, 4.6, 5.7 A3 due midnight yesterday

     Thur. Mar. 01 Midterm Exam A4: comparing systems

Optimizing performance
     Tues. Mar. 06 the key performance formula;
obstacles to compiling fast code
Guest lecture by Mike Spear
(rest of) Chapter 5
     Thur. Mar. 08 measuring performance A4 due noon Friday

      Mar. 13 & 15 UR spring break

The storage hierarchy
     Tues. Mar. 20 storage technology Chapter 6 A5: tuning performance
     Thur. Mar. 22 caching A5 trivia due, noon
     Tues. Mar. 27 performance tuning
Exceptional control flow
     Thur. Mar. 29 exceptions Chapter 8
     Tues. Apr. 03 processes, linking skim Chapter 7 A5 due midnight yesterday;
A6: Unix shell
     Thur. Apr. 05 signals and non-local jumps
A6 trivia due, noon
Measuring time
     Tues. Apr. 10 Chapter 9
Virtual memory
     Thur. Apr. 12 Address translation Chapter 10
     Tues. Apr. 17 Pentium/Linux case study A6 due midnight yesterday;
A7: memory allocation
     Thur. Apr. 19 Storage management A7 trivia due, noon
Concurrency and Networks
     Tues. Apr. 24 Threads and semaphores Selected topics from Chapters 12 and 13
     Thur. Apr. 26 Cache coherence
Course evaluations
     Tues. May 01 Transactional memory
Wrap-up
A7 due 11:59pm Friday

     Sat. May 12 Final Exam 8:30am, CSB 601

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Last Change: 19 April 2007 / Michael Scott's email address