COMPUTER ORGANIZATION
Wednesday/Friday 15:25pm — 16:40pm
Lattimore Room 201
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: Wednesday/Friday 3pm-3:25pm (and by appointment)
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.
 
Weikai Lin (Graduate TA)
Email: [wlin33 at ur.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Fri. 11am-12pm
Wegmans 3209
 
Ethan Chen (Graduate TA)
Email: [echen48 at ur.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Wed. 12pm-1pm
Wegmans 3209
 
Chenrui Wang (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [cwang111 at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Mon. 12pm-1pm
Wegmans UG Lab
 
Boyi Zhang (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [bzhang44 at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Thur. 2pm-3pm
Wegmans UG Lab
 
Jack Cashman (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [jcashman at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Tue. 5pm-6pm
Wegmans UG Lab
 
Jiaqi Nie (Undergraduate TA)
Email: [jnie7 at u.rochester.edu]
Office hours: Fri. 10am-11am
Wegmans UG Lab