Course Information

Short Intro

The objective of this course is to provide a complete introduction to computer system, in a programmer’s perspective.

Description

There are generally two main perspectives of view computer system: hardware view and software view. This course focuses on the software view, and especially, the programmer’s perspective.

The course will touch on the following topics:

• data and program representation
• processor architecture, code optimization
• cache, memory hierarchy
• virtualization, memory management
• process, multitasking, exceptional control flow
• system IO, file system
• network programming
• concurrency, synchronization, and parallelism
• other topics: linking, debugging etc.

Keywords: computer system, programming, performance, virtualization, concurrency

Prerequisites

Required：

• C programming language.
• Data Structure & Algorithms.

Recommended：

• Knowledge in computer science fundamentals: Operating System, Computer Architecture, Computer Network, etc.

Schedule

Friday, YG03-311.

Textbook

Not mandatory but recommended:

• Bryant, Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective
• Hennessy and Patterson, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach

Resources

• It’s possible to find PDF files from the web for all textbooks listed above.
• [Webpage for Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective]¹
• Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know²
• Compiler Explorer³
• [Course site]⁴