COM 1130 Computer Organization and Design

Course Format
Course Coordinator
Textbooks and References

Prerequisites by Topic
Major Topics Covered in Course
Laboratory Projects

Course Description

Discusses how a computer system works and why it performs as it does.  Topics include assembly language (programs, call/return, stack frames), arithmetic (representations and algorithms), digital design (implementation of an RISC subset), and organization (memory hierarchy).

4 QH credit
Prerequisite: COM 1101 COM 1101 or permission of the instructor.

Course Information

• Fall 2000
• Winter 2001
• Spring 2001

Course Format

BSCS03 required course
BSCS04 Systems core
BACS elective course
BSIS general elective

This course focuses on the internal workings of a computer. Students work on small programming projects using an assembly language simulator and conduct some performance analysis exercises.

Course Coordinators

Professor John Casey
jcasey@ccs.neu.edu

Textbooks and References

David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy.  Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo, 1998.

COM1130 packet: The lectures, plus introductions to some course tools: Xemacs, emacs, and the official debugger.

 

(Recommended) Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.  The C Programming Language: Second Edition. Prentice Hall, 1988.

 
References (All on reserve in Snell library):

• David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy.  Computer Architecture: a quantitative approach.  Second edition. Morgan-Kaufmann, c1996.
• Gerrit Blaauw and Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.  Computer Architecture: concepts and evolution.  Addison-Wesley, c1997.
• Mark D. Hill, Norman P. Jouppi, and Gurindar S. Sohi.  Readings in Computer Architecture.  Morgan Kaufmann, 2000.

History:

• Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray.  Computer: a history of the information machine.  Basic Books, 1996.
• Tracy Kidder. The Soul of a New Machine.Little-Brown, 1981.
• Maurice Wilkes. Memoirs of a computer pioneer.  MIT Press, 1985.
• Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere.  Out of Their Minds: the lives and discoveries of  15 great computer scientists.  Copernicus, c1995.

The MIPS family of chips:

• Gerry Kane and Joe Heinrich. MIPS RISC Architecture.  Prentice-Hall, 1992.
• Joe Heinrich. MIPS R4000 user's manual.  Prentice-Hall, c1993.
• Dominic Sweetman. See MIPS Run.  Morgan Kaufmann, c1999.

Hardware Design:

• Niklaus Wirth. Digital Circuit Design for Computer Science Students.  Springer, c1995.
• Randy Katz. Contemporary Logic Design.  Benjamin/Cummings, 1994.
• Franklin Prosser and David Winkel.  The Art of Digital Design: an introduction to top-down design.
• John Wakerly. Digital Design: principles and practices.  Second edition. Prentice-Hall, 1994.
• Edward McCluskey. Logic Design Principles:  with emphasis on testable semicustom circuits.  Prentice-Hall, 1986.
• Stephen Ward. Computation Structures.  McGraw-Hill, 1990.
• Systems Design:
• David Culler and Jaswinder Pal Singh, with Anoop Gupta.  Parallel Computer Architecture: a hardware/software approach.  Morgan Kaufmann, 1999.
• Carver Mead and Lynn Conway.  Introduction to VLSI Systems.  Addison-Wesley, 1980.

Course Goals

• what operations the chip can perform
• what data structure represents each of those operations
• how the hardware decodes each operation, and carries it out
• all operations are carried out by doing boolean algebra on single bits
• how all this affects performance
• how to write small programs in assembly language

Prerequisites by Topic

Some programming experience, or a course like COM1100, plus some data structures, at the level of COM1101.

Major Topics Covered in the Course

• C programming
• Assembly language programming
• Machine representation of integers, floats, characters, strings, instructions
• Input and output devices, and their control
• Instruction set implementation
• Memory and caches

Laboratory projects

Several programming projects.