Schedule for CSC 252, Spring 2014 (Tentative)

The following is my best guess as to the schedule for this term.  Click on the unit name to see my lecture notes.


Unit Topics Reading Assignments

Overview
     Thur. Jan. 16 Introduction Chapter 1 Get an account and set it up
Data representation
     Tues. Jan. 21 Overview Chapter 2 A1: datalab (bit twiddling)
     Thur. Jan. 23 Integers A1 trivia due, noon
     Tues. Jan. 28 Floating Point
Assembly-level programs
     Thur. Jan. 30 overview Chapter 3 A1 due midnight tomorrow;
A2: the binary bomb
     Tues. Feb. 04 control flow A2 trivia due, noon
     Thur. Feb. 06 subroutines
     Tues. Feb. 11 structured data
Processor architecture
     Thur. Feb. 13 circuits and history Chapter 4 intro; “asides” on RISC/CISC; Section 4.2.5 A2 due midnight tomorrow;
A3: the buffer bomb
     Tues. Feb. 18 sequential implementation Figures 4.22 and 4.23;
Section 4.5.1
A3 trivia due, noon
     Thur. Feb. 20 pipelining Figures 4.40, 4.41, 4.52;
Sections 4.4, 4.5.4–4.5.9
     Tues. Feb. 25 modern processors Sections 4.5.13, 4.6, 5.7
Optimizing performance
     Thurs. Feb. 27 the key performance formula;
obstacles to compiling fast code
(rest of) Chapter 5 A3 due midnight tomorrow
     Tues. Mar. 04 Midterm Exam

     Thur. Mar. 06 Special Event:  Bob Collwell, 11am, 318/418 Gleason Hall (business school); attendance mandatory

      Mar. 11 & 13 UR spring break (there is no A4 this year)

The storage hierarchy
     Tues. Mar. 18 storage technology Chapter 6 A5: tuning performance
     Thur. Mar. 20 caching A5 trivia due, noon
     Tues. Mar. 25 performance tuning
Exceptional control flow
     Thur. Mar. 27 exceptions Chapter 8
     Tues. Apr. 01 processes and signals A5 due midnight yesterday;
A6: Unix shell
     Thur. Apr. 03 non-local jumps, linking
skim Chapter 7 A6 trivia due, noon
Virtual memory
     Tues. Apr. 08 Address translation Chapter 9
     Thur. Apr. 10 Pentium/Linux case study
     Tues. Apr. 15 Storage management; Guest lecture by Ryan Yates (Prof. Scott out of town) A6 due midnight yesterday;
A7: memory allocation
I/O and Networks
     Thur. Apr. 17 read, write, streams Chapters 10 and 11 (skim all; read 10.1–10.3, 10.8–10.9, and 11.3–11.4 carefully) A7 trivia due, noon
Concurrency
     Tues. Apr. 22 Threads and semaphores Chapter 12 (skim all;  read 12.3–12.6 carefully)
     Thur. Apr. 24 Cache coherence
     Tues. Apr. 29 Transactional memory
Wrap-up
A7 due 11:59pm Friday

     Fri. May 9 Final Exam 8:30am, CSB 209

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Last Change: 21 December 2017 / Michael Scott's email address