Computer Engineering - Advanced Computer Architecture (Universität Paderborn)

Advanced Computer Architecture (6 CP, 3V+2Ü)

This course will be given in English and starts on Thursday, October 13, 2022 at 14:15 hours in room A3.

Subject and Goal

The course Advanced Computer Architecture teaches concepts and methods used in modern processor architecture to exploit the available parallelism at the levels of instructions, data and threads. The course covers the following topics:

Fundamentals of computer architectures
Memory hierarchy design
Instruction-level parallelism
Data-level parallelism: Vector, SIMD and GPU architectures
Thread-level parallelism
Warehouse-scale computers
Domain-specific architectures

The main reference for the course is the following book: Hennessy, Patterson: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (6th edition), Morgan Kaufmann, 2017, which is available in the university library.

Who Should Take this Course?

This course is mandatory for students of the Master program Computer Engineering, and an elective for students of the Master program Computer Science.

Although there are no formal prerequisites for taking this course, we expect that students have completed a Bachelor-level computer architecture course. Such a course should provide basic knowledge in instruction set architectures, assembly language programming, processor performance evaluation, data path and controller design, pipelining, and memory hierarchies.

We strongly recommend this self-assessment test to find out whether you should take this course.