CS2013-final-report

CS61C: Great Ideas in Computer Architecture, University of California,
Berkeley
Randy H. Katz
randy@cs.Berkeley.edu
http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61c/
Knowledge Areas that contain topics and learning outcomes covered in the course
Knowledge Area
Total Hours of Coverage
Systems Fundamentals (SF) 39
Where does the course fit in your curriculum
This is a third course in the computer science curriculum for intended majors, following courses in “great ideas in
Computer Science” and “Programming with Data Structures.” It provides a foundation for all of the upper division
systems courses by providing a thorough understanding of the hardware-software interface, the broad concepts of
parallel programming to achieve scalable high performance, and hands-on programming experience in C.
What is covered in the course
Introduction to C: this includes coverage of the Hardware/Software Interface (e.g., machine and assembly
language formats, methods of encoding instructions and data, and the mapping processes from high level
languages, particularly C, to assembly and machine language instructions). Computer architectures: how
processors interpret/execute instructions, Memory Hierarchy, Hardware Building Blocks, Single CPU Datapath
and Control, and Instruction Level Parallelism. The concept of parallelisms, in particular, task level parallelism,
illustrated with Map-Reduce processing; Data Level Parallelism, illustrated with the Intel SIMD instruction set;
Thread Level Parallelism/multicore programming, illustrated with openMP extensions to the C programming
language.
What is the format of the course
Three hours of lecture per week, one hour of TA-led discussion per week, two hours of laboratory per week.
How are students assessed
Laboratories, Homeworks, Exams, Four Projects (Map-Reduce application on Amazon EC2), MIPS Instruction
Set Emulator in C, Memory and Parallelism-Aware Application Improvement, Logic Design and Simulation of a
MIPS processor subset).
Course textbooks and materials
Patterson and Hennessy, Computer Organization and Design, revised 4 th Edition, 2012; Kernighan and Ritchie,
The C Programming Language, 2 nd Edition; Borroso, The Datacenter as a Computer, Morgan and Claypool
publishers.
Why do you teach the course this way
The overarching theme of the course is the hardware-software interface, in particular, focusing on what a
programmer needs to know about the underlying hardware to achieve high performance for his or her code.
Generally, this concentrates on harnessing parallelism, in particular, task level parallelism (map-reduce), data level
parallelism (SIMD instruction sets), multicore (openMP), and processor instruction pipelining. The six “great”
ideas presented in the course are (1) Layers of Representation/Interpretation, (2) Moore’s Law, (3) Principle of
Locality/Memory Hierarchy, (4) Parallelism, (5) Performance Evaluation, and (6) Dependability via Redundancy.
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