COMPUTER ORGANIZATION
Tuesday/Thursday 12:30-13:45pm
WH 1400
Instructor: Yuhao Zhu
Course Description

CSC 252 will not be easy, but will be a rare enlightenment and give you unique thrills.

In CSC 172 you learned how to write programs in languages that humans can understand (e.g., Java). CSC 252 will teach you how human-readable programs actually run on a computer. We will explain how to transform a human-readable program to a computer-understandable program, how the computer-understandable program is organized and interfaced with the underlying hardware processor, and how to design hardware processors that can execute programs as fast, safe, and efficient as possible.

Ultimately, our objective is to remove a good deal of the mystery of how modern computers work. There is NO magic. Even if you decide not to be a computer system designer in future, knowing these will empower you to get the computer to do useful work for you. In that vein, we will start at the bottom and work our way up. In every case, when we cover a sophisticated topic, we will try to tie it to what you already know. In this way, you don't have to memorize because everything you will learn next will be built on top of what you have already learned. We expect you to come out of this course not only knowing how modern computers work, having a deeper understanding of why they work as they are, but more importantly, why computers don't have to be built that way!

Instructor and TAs
Yuhao Zhu (Instructor)
Email: [yzhu at rochester.edu]
Office hours: Thursday 2pm-3pm
WH 3501
Don' be afraid of coming to office hours! Coming to office hours does not mean you are a weak student. You can come to the office hours to discuss things that are not course related, too.
 
Kalen Frieberg (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [kfrieber at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Wednesday 5pm-6pm.
 
Gunnar Hammonds (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [ghammon5 at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Tuesday 3pm-4pm
 
Mandar Juvekar (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [mjuvekar at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Tuesday 11am-12pm
 
Zihao Lin (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [zlin22 at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Thursday 3pm-4pm
 
Vladimir Maksimovski (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [vmaksimo at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Monday 3:30pm-4:30pm
 
Abhishek Tyagi (Graduate TA)
Email: [atyagi2 at cs.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Friday 3pm-4pm
 
Nisarg Ujjainkar (Graduate TA)
Email: [nujjaink at ur.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Monday 11am-12pm
 
Yiyao (Jack) Yu (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [yyu57 at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Tuesday 2pm-3pm