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 and code optimization
• cache and memory hierarchy
• virtualization and memory management
• synchronization and concurrent programming
• other topics: linking, exceptional control flow, system IO, network programming, etc.

Keywords: computer system, program 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.
• Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective¹
• Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know²
• [Course site]³