ECE 206 High-Performance Processors - Spring 2009
Prof. Howie Huang
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Monday
6:10 - 8:40 PM, DUQUES 359
Office Hours: Monday 2 - 5 PM or by appointments

Introduction
This class covers advanced topics in high-performance processers, including superscalar, branch prediction, speculation, multithreading, multicore, cell processor, GPGPU, and real-world examples.  Background in computer architecture and operating systems is required.  Each student will be expected to read related chapters and papers before the class and participate in discussions.   There will be one exam.  In addition, students are required to complete a semester-long research project in groups of two students.  All assignments are due in class on Mondays.  Please note that 20% of the grade will be deducted for each day that an assignment is late.  Students are required to honor the GWU Code of Academic Integrity when completing all assignments, projects, and examinations. 

Textbook: Modern Processor Design: Fundamentals of Superscalar Processors, John Paul Shen and Mikko H. Lipasti, McGraw-Hill Professional, 2005.

Reference: Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson, Morgan Kaufmann, 2007.

Grading
Participation:                                       10%

            Each student must be willing to participate fully in the class.  It is insufficient just to show up.
Homework
:                                          15%
         
Exam:                                                     35%  (May 4)
Course Project:                                    40%
   Initial Proposal                                            (Feb 2)
   Final Proposal                                      5%  (Feb 9)
   Mid-term Report                                10%  (Mar 23)
   Final Report                                        25%  (May 4)

TENTATIVE Course Schedule

Week 1
Jan 12

Introduction

 Ch 1

 

 

Week 2
Jan 19


Martin Luther King Jr. Day 

No lecture


Week 3
Jan 26


Pipeline  & Memory

 Ch 2 and 3

Week 4
Feb 2

 

Superscalar I

Project proposal presentations


Ch 4

Preliminary proposal due

Meet with the instructor

Week 5
Feb 9


Superscalar II

Ch 5


Project proposal due

Week 6
Feb 16

Presidents' Day

No lecture
                                           


Week 7
Feb 23


Instruction Flow
Ch 9

 

Week 8
March 2

Multithreading

Ch 11

 

Week 9
March 9

Superscalar Processor

Ch 6, 7, and 8

 

Week 10
March 16

Spring Break


No lecture


Week 11
March 23
Multicore I
P Kongetira et al. "Niagara, a 32-way Multithreaded Sparc Processor," IEEE Micro, March 2005.

H. McGhan, "Niagara 2 Opens the Flood Gates," Microprocessor, Nov 2006.

Midterm project report due

Week 13
March 30

Multicore II

Olukotun, L. Hammond, "The Future of Microprocessors," ACM Queue, 2005.

Raj Yavatkar, "Platforms Design Challenges with Many Cores", HPCA 2006 

Intel whitepaper, "From a Few Cores to Many: A Tera-scale Computing Research Overview", 2006.

Intel, "Inside Intel Core Microarchitecture: Setting New Standards for Energy-Efficient Performance."

Intel, "Preparing for Peta-scale."


 

Week 14
April 6

Thermal Management I D. Brooks, P. Bose, S. Schuster, H. Jacobson, P. Kudva, A. Buyuktosunoglu, J.D. Wellman, V. Zyuban, M. Gupta, and P. Cook, “Power-Aware Microarchitecture: Design and Modeling Challenges for Next-Generation Microprocessors,” IEEE Micro, Nov/Dec, 2000.

T. Mudge, “Power: A First-Class Architectural Design Constraint,” IEEE Computer, 2001.

Heat-and-run: Leveraging SMT and CMP to manage power density through the operating system. Michael Powell, Mohamed Gomaa, and T. N. Vijaykumar In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on architectural support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS), pages 260-270, October 2004

 

Week 15
April 13

Thermal Management II
Mitigating Amdahl's Law through EPI Throttling Murali Annavaram, Ed Grochowski, John Shen June 2005 Proceedings of the 32nd Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture ISCA '05

J. Donald and M. Martonosi, "Techniques for Multicore Thermal Management", ISCA 06      

 

Week 16
April 20


Cell

 

Kahle, J. A. et al. "Introduction to the cell multiprocessor". IBM J. Res. Dev. 49, 4/5 (Jul. 2005), 589-604.  

                                                         


Week 17
April 27

 

Final project presentation



Week 18
April 29

GPGPU

Harris, M. 2005. "Mapping computational concepts to GPUs". In ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 Courses (Los Angeles, California, July 31 - August 04, 2005). J. Fujii, Ed. SIGGRAPH '05. ACM, New York, NY, 50.

John D. Owens et al. "
A Survey of General-Purpose Computation on Graphics Hardware". Computer Graphics Forum, 26(1):80–113, March 2007. 


Week 19
May 4

Final Exam


Final Project Report Due

 
Last Updated: April 20, 2009