Pipelining with a fixed number of stages per instruction: hardware resource utilization, interdependencies, bypassing, waiting, delayed branches, interrupts. Pipelining with variable number of stages, VLIW and superscalar, out-of-order execution, software pipelining, multi-threaded processors, vector processors, graphics processors (GPU). Instruction set architecture: basic principles of computer system design, cost, performance, frequency of instruction usage. Performance evaluation using benchmarks. Study of various instruction set types and their components. Examples of machines and their instruction sets. Memory and I/O systems: cache memory, parameters (cache size, block size, associativity), and their effect on performance, cache-coherence. Virtual memory, address translation, protection, TLBs. Page faults and pipelining. Physical/virtual-address cache memories (index/tag), aliasing, flushing. I/O and peripheral devices. Exercises and simulations for performance comparison of systems with high-performance cores and caches.
Learning Outcomes
The students, upon successful completion of the course:
They will have learned the basic principles and techniques of designing and optimizing the performance of modern computing systems.
They will be able to understand the interactions between applications, compilers, instructions and the micro-architecture of processors.
They will be able to quantitatively evaluate the performance of computing systems and propose alternative designs/options for different optimization objectives.
They will be able to do basic research on computer architecture.
Student Performance Evaluation
Specific details on grading can be found on the course’ s website
The courses of the Computer Science Department are designated with the letters "CS" followed by three decimal digits. The first digit denotes the year of study during which students are expected to enroll in the course; the second digit denotes the area of computer science to which the course belongs.
First Digit
Advised Year of Enrollment
1,2,3,4
First, Second, Third and Fourth year
5,6
Graduate courses
7,8,9
Specialized topics
Second Digit
Computer Science Area
0
Introductory - General
1
Background (Mathematics, Physics)
2
Hardware Systems
3
Networks and Telecommunication
4,5
Software Systems
6
Information Systems
7
Computer Vision and Robotics
8
Algorithms and Theory of Computation
9
Special Projects
The following pages contain tables (one for each course category) summarizing courses offered by the undergraduate studies program of the Computer Science Department at the University of Crete. Courses with code-names beginning with "MATH" or "PHYS" are taught by the Mathematics Department and Physics Department respectively at the University of Crete.
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