CS 465- Computer Systems Architecture
Department of Computer Science
George Mason University
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Back to the course Web site.
- The GTA assigned to this course is Ms. Chetana Parupalli (cparupal@gmu.edu). Her office hours will be Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2-4PM at a location TBD. Students can set virtual appointments with her if needed.
Please address questions related to homework assignments to the GTA.
The TA is also available over e-mail.
Please prefix the subject of your messages to her with "CS 465".
- If you are a student with a disability and you need academic accommodations, please see me and contact the Office of Disability Services (ODS) at (703) 993-2474. All academic accommodations must be arranged through the ODS.
- Activate your GMU e-mail account by going to
https://mail.gmu.edu/ and selecting "Activating my Account".
All class-related communication will be sent to your Mason account.
- Resources: University Catalog,
University Policies,
CS Department Honor Code. and
Computing resources available from the Volgenau School of Engineering.
- Academic integrity: a number of projects in this class are designed to be completed within your study group. With collaborative work, names of all the participants should appear on the work. Collaborative projects may be divided up so that individual group members complete portions of the whole, provided that group members take sufficient steps to ensure that the pieces conceptually fit together in the end product. Other projects are designed to be undertaken independently. In the latter case, you may discuss your ideas with others and conference with peers on drafts of the work; however, it is not appropriate to give your paper to someone else to revise. You are responsible for making certain that there is no question that the work you hand in is your own. If only your name appears on an assignment, your professor has the right to expect that you have done the work yourself, fully and independently.
- VSE Labs: Lab hours can be found on the Labs web site. Please remember to save your work to an external drive as any data stored on those computers will not persist after a reboot.
- Read the interview with Daniel Menasce to ACM's Ubiquity, April 2012, before the first day of classes.
- Last day to add or drop classes with no tuition penalty: 8/30/2021.
- Last day to drop classes with 100% refund: 9/7/2021.
- Last day to drop classes with 50% refund: 9/14/2021.
- I recommend a virtual tour of the Computer History Museum.
- Final exam date and time: 12/13/2021 from 10:30am to 1:15pm.
- IEEE Computer, IEEE Internet Computing, Comm. ACM, and HPC Wire articles for class discussion (if you are not on campus you need to connect to a VPN first. The VPN software can be downloaded from https://labs.vse.gmu.edu/index.php/Services/VPN).
- Body of Knowledge: Value by Squares, IEEE Computer, July 2021, pp. 79-81, Due: August 30, 2021.
- Connecting Fog and Cloud Computing, D. S. Linthicum, IEEE Cloud Computing, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 18-20, March-April 2017.
Due:
- Rewarded for RISC,
Neil Savage, Communications of the ACM, 61(6), pp. 10-12. This article talks about Dave Patterson and John Hennessy, coauthors of your textbok, who received the 2017 ACM Turing Award (the Nobel Prize for computing). Due: .
- Retrospective on Amdahl's Law in the Multicore Era, Mark D. Hill and Michael R. Marty, IEEE Computer, June 2017. Due: September 27, 2021
- Think Fast – Is Neuromorphic Computing Set to Leap Forward?, John Russell, HPC Wire, August 15, 2016, Due:
- Extrapolating from Moore's Law Cusumano, Michael A. and Yoffie, David B., Comm. ACM, January 2016.
Due: .
- A Simple Quantiication of the Weakest-Link Phenomenon, Behrooz Parhami, IEEE Computer,
July 2015.
Due: October 12, 2021.
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The case for energy-proportional computing, L.A. Barroso ad U. Holzle, IEEE Computer, Vol. 40(12), 2007. Due: Septenber 8, 2021.
- Will Power Problems Curtail Processor Progress?, Leavitt, N., IEEE Computer, vol. 45, No. 5, pp. 15-17. Due: .
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Analyzing End-to-End Energy Consumption for Digital Services, C. Preist et al., IEEE Computer, vol. 47, No. 5, pp. 92-95. Due:
- Big Iron Moves Toward Exascale Computing, N. Leavitt, IEEE Computer, vol. 45, No. 11, pp.
14-17. For class discussion on .
- Sustainable IT: Challenges, Postures, and Outcomes, Curry, E.; Guyon, B.; Sheridan, C.; Donnellan, B., IEEE Computer, vol.
45, No. 11, pp. 79-81. Due:
- GPUs Go Mobile, Garber, Lee,
IEEE Computer, vol. 46, No. 2, pp. 16-19. Due: .
- Using In-Memory Analytics to Quickly Crunch Big Data, Garber, Lee,
IEEE Computer, vol. 45, No. 10, pp. 16-18. For class discussion on
- Holistic Datacenter Design in the Open Compute Project,
Frachtenberg, E., IEEE Computer, Vol. 45, No. 7, 2012, pp. 83-85.
Due:
- Cloud computing: The new normal?, S. Murugesan, IEEE Computer Vol. 46(1), 2-13. Due:
- Measuring Green IT in Society, Zhiwei Xu, IEEE Computer, vol.45, no.5, pp.83,85, May 2012. Due:.
- Finding the Needle
in the Big Data Systems Haystack, Kraska, T., IEEE Internet Computing, IEEE , vol.17, no.1, pp.84,86, Jan.-Feb. 2013.
Due:
- Len
Kleinrock: The First Two Packets on the Internet, C. Severance, IEEE Internet Computing, IEEE , vol.18, no.3, pp. 10-11, March 2004.
Due: TBD.
- Breaking Moore's Law: How chipmakers are pushing PCs
to blistering new levels, B. Chacos, PCWorld, April 11, 2013. Due: .
- If you are having problems getting to the IEEE articles, go to http://furbo.gmu.edu/dbwiz/it and login with your Mason credentials. Then scroll down to IEEE/IET Electronic Library.
- Reading Assignments from the Textbook:
- Study sections 1.1 through 1.6 of chapter 1. Due: September 13, 2021.
- Study sections 1.7 through 1.12 of chapter 1. Due: September 13, 2021.
- Study sections 2.1 through 2.8 of chapter 2: Due: September 20, 2021.
- Study sections 2.9 through 2.20 (skip 2.15-2.18) of chapter 2: Due: October 4, 2021
- Study sections 3.1 through 3.5. Due: October 4, 2021.
- Study sections 3.6 through the end of chapter 3, skipping 3.7. Due: October 4, 2021.
- Study sections 4.1 through 4.5. Due: October 4, 2021
- Study sections 4.6 through 4.8 Due:
- Study sections 4.14-4.15 of the book: Due: .
- Study sections 5.1-5.5 of the book: Due: .
- Study sections 5.6-5.10, 5.12, 5.15-5.16 of the book.
Due:
- Install in your computer PathSim, a simulator of the simple data path discussed in sections 4.1-4.4 of Computer Organization and Design, Patterson, D.A. and Hennessy, J. L., Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.
This web-based simulator allows its users to enter MIPS assembly code and step-wise execute through the assembled machine code while viewing the values placed on the data lines with each instruction. The url for the latest version
of PathSim is: http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~mehtaa/comporg/PathSim4/DataPathSimulator/HelpFiles/aboutPathSim.html.
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The slides used for midterm review are
here.
The solutions are here..
- Homework Assignments (when team work is allowed, all team members must be registered in this session of the course):
- Assignment 0 (0 points): Due: September 7, 2021. There is no need to turn this in.
- Assignment 1 (100 points): Due: September 22, 2021, before 11:59pm. Team work (up to 2 per team) allowed.
- Assignment 2 (100 points): Due: October 20 before 11:59pm. Team work (up to 2 per team) allowed.
- Assignment 3 (100 points): Due: November 10, 2021 before 11:59pm . Team work (up to 2 per team) allowed.
- Assignment 4 (corrected) (100 points): Due: December 1, 2021 before 11:59pm . Team work (up to 2 per team) allowed.
- Review for the Final 2021 exam.
Last updated: December 2, 2021