I will be available in my office (OHS 306) 10:30-11:20 on Tuesdays and Thursdays and 1:30-3:20 on Wednesdays, as well as by appointment. Or try your luck: just stop by and see whether my door is open. You may send me electronic mail at max@gustavus.edu. I won't hold office hours on 9/5, 10/2, 10/3, 10/23, 11/6, 11/14, 11/21, or 11/22. I'll try to put any updates to my office hours on my web page, so check there if in doubt.
The final deadline for rewrites of homework problems is at the start of class on October 4th for Chapters 1-3, November 15th for Appendix C and Chapters 4-5, and December 13th for Chapter 6-7 and Appendix A.
Unless I indicate that a particular problem must be done individually, you may work on any problem in a group of two or three students. One copy of the solution produced by the team should be turned in, with all team members' names on it. Write “we all contributed fairly to this solution” and have all team members sign under that statement.
You must show your work; a numerical answer is not an acceptable solution to a homework problem.
There will be two intra-term take-home tests as shown on the schedule below and a final exam as scheduled by the registrar. If you have a conflict with a testing time, please contact me as soon as possible to make an alternative arrangement.
My default assumption is that students will take the final together. Therefore, I would ask you to please be respectful and quiet, even after completing your exam, so that your fellow students have a good test-taking environment. However, if you prefer to take the exam in a separate room, please contact me in advance and I will try to arrange it.
Tests will be closed-book and mostly closed-notes. You may, however, use a single 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper with hand-written notes for reference. (Both sides of the sheet are OK.)
Any substantive contribution to your solution by another person or taken from a publication should be properly acknowledged in writing. Failure to do so is plagiarism and will necessitate disciplinary action.
The same standards regarding plagiarism apply to team projects as to the work of individuals, except that the author is now the entire team rather than an individual. Anything taken from a source outside the team should be be properly cited.
One additional issue that arises from the team authorship of project reports is that all team members must stand behind all reports bearing their names. All team members have quality assurance responsibility for the entire project. If there is irreconcilable disagreement within the team it is necessary to indicate as much in the report.
You are expected to be familiar with the college academic honesty honor code policy and to comply with that policy. If you have any questions about it, please ask.
If you are too sick to complete an assignment on time, you will not be penalized. Simply write “late due to illness” at the top of the assignment, sign your name and hand it in. Other circumstances will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
Gustavus Adolphus College is committed to ensuring the full participation of all students in its programs. If you have a documented disability (or you think you may have a disability of any nature) and, as a result, need reasonable academic accommodation to participate in class, take tests or benefit from the College's services, then you should speak with the Disability Services Coordinator, for a confidential discussion of your needs and appropriate plans. Course requirements cannot be waived, but reasonable accommodations may be provided based on disability documentation and course outcomes. Accommodations cannot be made retroactively; therefore, to maximize your academic success at Gustavus, please contact Disability Services as early as possible. Disability Services (https://gustavus.edu/advising/disability/) is located in the Advising and Counseling Center.
Support for English Language Learners (ELL) and multilingual students is available via the College's ELL Support staff person, Andrew Grace (agrace@gustavus.edu or x7395). He can meet individually with students to consult about academic tasks and to help students seek other means of support. In addition, ELL and multilingual students can seek help from peer tutors in the Writing Center. Please let me know if there is any accommodation in the course that would enable you to more fully show your abilities; for example, I would consider allowing extra time on tests, as well as allowing a dictionary in an otherwise closed-book test.
The two topics or activities shown for each date correspond approximately to the two halves of the class period with a brief stretching break in between. However, we will divide the time to meet our needs rather than necessarily at the halfway point.
Sections shown in italics are on the CD-ROM accompanying the textbook. The CD-ROM files are also available for download.
Date | Reading | Topic | Due |
---|---|---|---|
9/4 | Introduction | ||
1.1-1.3 | Computer abstractions and technology | ||
9/6 | 1.4-1.9 | Performance | |
2.1-2.4 | Instructions, especially arithmetic | ||
9/11 | 2.5-2.7 | More instructions | |
2.8-2.9 | Procedures and strings in assembly | ||
9/13 | 2.10-2.12 | More on assembly programming | |
B.1-B.6,B.9 | Assembly programming tools | ||
9/18 | 2.13-2.14 | Assembly programming examples | |
Lab 1: Elementary assembly programming | |||
9/20 | 2.16-2.19 | Yet more on assembly language | |
Lab 1 (continued) | |||
9/25 | 3.1-3.3 | Arithmetic | |
Lab 1 (continued) | |||
9/27 | 3.5-3.6 | Floating point arithmetic | Lab 1 |
Lab 2: More advanced assembly programming | |||
10/2 | No class (attend Nobel Conference) | ||
10/4 | Review; catch-up; take-home 1 out | HW rewrites (1-3) | |
Lab 2 (continued) | |||
10/9 | C.1-C.3 | Combinational logic | Take-home test 1 |
Lab 2 (continued) | |||
10/11 | C.7-C.11 | Sequential logic | |
Lab 2 (continued) | |||
10/16 | 4.1-4.3 | A simple datapath | |
Lab 2 (continued) | |||
10/18 | 4.4 | A single-cycle processor | Lab 2 |
4.5 | Pipelining | ||
10/25 | 4.6 | Pipelined datapath and control | |
4.10-4.11 | Advanced instruction-level parallelism | ||
10/30 | 5.1-5.2 | Caches | |
5.3 | Cache performance | ||
11/1 | 7.10 | Roofline performance model | |
Pre-lab activity for Lab 3 | |||
11/6 | No class (go vote) | ||
11/8 | 5.4 | Virtual memory | |
Lab 3: Memory system performance | |||
11/13 | 5.5-5.6 | Memory hierarchies and virtual machines | |
Lab 3 (continued) | |||
11/15 | 5.10-5.12 | Review; catch-up; take-home 2 out | HW rewrites (C,4-5) |
Lab 3 (continued) | |||
11/20 | 5.8 | Cache coherence | Take-home test 2 |
Lab 3 (continued) | |||
11/27 | 7.1-7.5 | Multiprocessors and multithreading | |
Class discussion of lab 4 | |||
11/29 | 7.6-7.7,7.12-7.13 | SIMD, vector, and graphics processors | Lab 3 |
Lab 4: Multiprocessor performance | |||
12/4 | A.1-A.7 | Graphics processing units | |
Lab 4 (continued) | |||
12/6 | Lab 4 (continued) | ||
Lab 4 (continued) | |||
12/11 | A.8-A.10 | Programming GPUs | Lab 4 |
6.11 | Networks | ||
12/13 | More on networks | ||
Review; catch-up; evaluation | HW rewrites (6-7,A) |
Course web site: http://gustavus.edu/+max/courses/F2012/MCS-284/