Welcome to DARK2 2005

Dear Computer Lover,

Welcome to the advanced computer architecture course (DARK2) at the Department of information technology at Uppsala University 2005.

First of all, if you have not already done so, please fill out and submit the informal sign-up form in the Forms directory in the left margin. The information you enter in that form is for my eyes only, you will still have to register to the course the normal way.

Unlike the lectures in the preparatory DARK1 course, which taught you how computer are designed, the goal of this course is to teach you *why* computers are built the way they are. We will reason about performance models and discuss pros/cons of the different techniques. We also cover some of the more exciting areas (I may be a bit biased here ) including various performance optimization found in modern CPUs as well as modern memory systems and multiprocessor architectures. At the end of the course you should be able to at least able to understand and appreciate why new computer systems are built the way they are and understand how you best can utilize them.

This year, the course will be offered in three flavors:

1. DARK2-ITP includes the lectures, the two labs and the exam (3p)
2. DARK2-MN2 is the same as DARK2-ITP plus a written report (5p)
3. DARK2-PhD is the same as DARK-ITP plus an extra assignment (5p)

The book used this year is the classic Hennessy/Pattersen "Computer Architecture -- a Quantitative Approach" 3rd edition. (It is very important that you get the 3rd edition.) It is a very good book written by two of the best known computer architects in academia. I will complement the book with some research papers and recent product information in order to bring you up to date, but much less so this year than previous years since the book is updated.

This year my PhD student Frédéric Haziza will help me with labs and hand-in grading. He is actively pursuing research in computer systems.

As for myself, I have been jumping back and forth between academia and industry five times in my carrier, and have been a professor in computer architecture at Uppsala for six years now (time flies). Most recently, I was the chief architect for high-end server engineering at Sun Microsystems in California. The current edition of the book describes some of the systems I've worked on in detail. So if you see me jump up and down and cover some part of the book down to some gory details, that is why . You can find some of my research stuff here: Uppsala Architecture Research Team (UART).

The new labs used last year based on the instruction-level simulator SIMICS was very appreciated and will continued this year. This year we have developed a new multiprocessor lab. We hope you are goint to enjoy it!. The three hand-in assignments will be revised a bit compared with last year.m

Welcome to DARK2. This is gonna' be fun!

// Erik Hagersten and Frédéric Haziza