Computer Science 252: Graduate Computer Architecture

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Announcements

Project Presentation Schedule
 
 

Tuesday 5/7	Thursday 5/9	Tuesday 5/14
Mukund Seshadri	Yatish and Yury	Will Plisker
David Garmire and Stephan Sorkin	Ben and Jittat	Donald Chai and Doug Densmore
Holly Fait and Dan Atkins	Mani, Jason and Sourav	Kaushik Raundran, Steve Singha & Satrajit Chaterjee
	Kirsten, John and Xiaodong	Ali, Haley, Rachael
		Lakshmi

 
 
 

CS grads: the faculty voted to change the Preliminary Breadth Courses requirements in Fall 2000 to be systems, theory, and systems meets theory: therefore CS 252 is included with a set of systems courses such as CS262 or CS267.

Grads from other departments and EECS undergrads interested in taking CS 252 in Spring, read this warning before class starts.
 

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Catalog Description

Expanded Description

In addition to the textbook, this course includes a number of readings from research papers. Such papers are important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is to understand that design decisions are not always black and white. Students will also undertake a major computing systems analysis and design project of their own choosing.
 

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Course Grading

Departmental Grading Guidelines for Graduate courses

Instructor

Lecturer: Professor David E. Culler 626 Soda Hall, 643-7572, culler@cs.berkeley.edu Office Hours: Tues 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM, or by appt. contact Michelle Willard, 643-2568,  mwillard@EECS.Berkeley.EDU, 626 Soda, for appt.

 
• Teaching Assistant:

    Jason Hill (jhill@cs)
    Office Hours: TBA

Location

Communication

Textbook

J. L. Hennessy and D. A. Patterson, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 3rd Edition, Morgan Kaufmann Publishing Co., Menlo Park, CA. 2001.  We will be using reprints of "pages" in final editing stages.  They are to be purchased from 387 Soda from Jeanette Cooke or Cindy

Readings in Computer Architecture
 

Course Schedule

Lec 27 reading:
1.M. Y. Hsiao, A Class of Optimal Minimum Odd-weight-column SC-DED Codes, IBM J. Res Develop, vol 14, no 4, July 1970
   2.Shigeo Kaneda, A Class of Odd-Weight-Column SEC-DED-SbED Codes for Memory System Applications, IEEE Transactions on computers, vol c-33, no 8, August 1984
   3.M. Blaum, J. Brady, J. Bruck and J. Menon, EVENODD: an optimal scheme for tolerating double disk failures in RAID architectures, Proceedings of the 21st International
     Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), 1994

Lecture notes will be available in pdf and powerpoint formats, with 6 per page for pdf for conventinent printing.. (Powerpoint is for instructors who want to give lectures themselves based on CS 252.)

Every effort will be made to get the notes on the web prior to the lecture. Note, however, that the notes may be updated slightly following the lecture. Click here for instructions regarding how to view pdf files.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute this material for educational purposes only, provided that the complete bibliographic citation and following credit line is included: "Copyright 2002 UCB." Permission is granted to alter and distribute this material provided that the following credit line is included: "Adapted from (complete bibliographic citation). Copyright 2001 UCB."

This material may not be copied or distributed for commercial purposes without express written permission of the copyright holder. The only exception is for copies of these lecture notes for course readers from copy companies like Copymat or Kinkos.

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Course Projects

• Implementing a watchdog architecture on TOS motes, Ali Lakhia, Hayley Iben, Rachel Rubin
• Modeling Memory Systems Using Communication-Based Design, Doug Densmore & Donald Chai

Related Course Pages

• CS 252, Home Page, Dave Patterson

Fall 2000

• CS 252 - Home Page, John Kubiatowic

Fall 1999

• CS 152 - Home Page, John Kubiatowic

Spring 1998

• CS 252 - Home Page, Dave Patterson

Fall 1997

• CS 152 - Home Page, Dave Patterson

Fall 1996

• CS 252 - Home Page, Dave Patterson
• CS 152 - Home Page, David Culler

Spring 1996

• CS 252 - Home Page, Randy Katz
• CS 252 - TA Page, Daniel Jiang
• CS 252 - Course Projects
• CS 152 - Home Page, David Culler

Fall 1995

• CS 252 - Home Page, Randy Katz 
• CS 252 - Course Projects
• CS 152 - Home Page, David Patterson, Robert Yung

Fall 1994

• CS 252 - Home Page, David Patterson,

Other Useful Links and Resources

• WWW Computer Architecture Home Page
• Online version of classic architecture book  Computer structures: readings and examples [Compiled by] C. Gordon

Bell [and] Allen Newell. New York, McGraw-Hill [c1971]
• Online version of 2nd edition of that classic architecture book Computer structures: principles and examples by Siewiorek, D., C. G. Bell, A. Newell, l. New York, McGraw-Hill [c1982]
• comp.arch - Usenet newsgroup for computer architecture
• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH)
• Benchmark Warehouse Center
• CS Research Projects

Search Utilities

• Melvyl on the Web
• Gladis
• NCSTRL - National Computer Science Technical Reports Library
• NCSTRL at UC Berkeley CS
• The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies
• AltaVista
• HotBot
• Yahoo

Tools

• Tools: a short story, by Remzi Arpaci, briefly describes pixie, pixstats, prof, dinero, qpt, CPROF, spim, Cacti, shade, and spixtools. Most of the specific directories and files mentioned are on the instructional machines.
• Wisconsin Architectural Research Tool Set (WARTS) - including QPT, QPT2, CPROF, Tycho, dineroIII, and EEL
• ATOM - A toolkit that can be used for tracing, and much more. Only runs on Alphas. Log in to either saidin.eecs (an instructional machine) or speeding.cs (on the same file system as the NOW machines)
• EEL - A toolkit that can be used for tracing, and much more. Only runs on SPARCs.

See the following class project for some more details.
• Etch - A tracing tool for Intel x86 platforms running either Win95, WinNT, or Linux. Courtesy of Harvard University and the University of Washington.
• Instruction-Level Simulation And Tracing - This contains a huge list of simulators, emulators, and tracing tools, including an extensive bibliography as well as list of people to contact

Benchmarks

• The Performance Database Server
• Benchmarks FAQ - from the newsgroup comp.benchmarks
• Benchmark Warehouse Center
• SPEC benchmarks - benchmark suite from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation
• bench - network benchmark program for IP networks that measures bulk transfer throughput and round trip delays using either TCP/IP or UDP/IP
• lmbench - micro-benchmark suite that measures system latency and bandwidth of data movement among the processor and memory, network, file system, and disk
• HBench-OS - an improved version of lmbench that fixes bugs, generates more statistically-accurate results, and includes support for the Pentium and Pentium Pro performance monitoring counters
• ttcp - times transmission and reception of data between two systems using UDP and TCP protocols

Traces

• Etch Traces - user level traces of Windows NT applications collected using Etch.
• Etch Traces - another link.
• BYU Traces
• Monster Traces - Traces of 8 applications (run under Ultrix and Mach) collected with a hardware monitor on a DEC-MIPS workstation. Includes user and kernel activity. First presented in a paper which appeared in ISCA95. Courtesy of Richard Uhlig (thanks to Christoforos for getting them). More details forthcoming when these are actually available.
• Patchwrx - Single-processor portions of traces, containing user and kernel references, from 2 spec benchmarks and a database, running under Windows NT on an Alpha. Courtesy of Dick Sites, from DEC. A few projects from last spring's IRAM class as well as a Spring 1996 CS 252 projects detail some caveats concerning the accuracy of these traces (and of Dick Sites' conclusions regarding "Caches Don't Work".)
• New Mexico State Univ Trace Database
• Internet Traffic Archive- contains 5 traces of TCP/ethernet traffic, 6 traces of requests received by specific web servers, 2 traces of web client requests (from some pool of clients), and a set of traceroute measurements. Traces can span hours or weeks and may occupy multiple megabytes uncompressed.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

More info from Westley Weimer: "The web requests (the only ones I have examined in detail) tend to be long text files of tuples: (client-ip, time, document requested, size, etc) with the exact fields and format varying by trace. One trace even comes with a C interface for reading their records. "

Simulators

• The SimpleScalar simulator is a very flexible simulation package that comes with a working version of GCC and precompiled  versions of the SPEC 95 benchmark suite.  SimpleScalar comes with several different simulators, each of which supports a different level of simulation: everything from timing-free but fast simulation (for debugging), to a full out-of-order simulator.  The simulated processor is a variant of the MIPS architecture.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

For a precompiled version that works on Linux X86, see Kubiatowicz's home page: ~kubitron/simplescalar.

CPU info

• The CPU Info Center has a good summary of high-level info
• MIPS does a very good job of providing on-line documentation
• There's a neat Intel Secrets page, which is subtitled "What Intel Doesn't Want You To Know"
• I some hardcopy documentation on DEC Alpha microprocessors. I am willing to briefly loan them for making selective copies, or I can provide you with information as to how you can order (for free) your own copy.