Course Info
| Lectures | Tuesday 10:15-12:00 in INF 019 & Thursday 10:15-12:00 in INJ 218 |
|---|---|
| Web Page | http://parsa.epfl.ch/course-info/cs471/ |
| Instructor | Babak Falsafi |
| Email, URL | babak.falsafi /at/ epfl.ch, http://parsa.epfl.ch/~falsafi/ |
| Office | INJ 233 |
| Office Hours | By appointment |
| Phone | +41 21 693 55 92 |
| Assistant | Shanqing Lin |
| Email, URL | shanqing.lin /at/ epfl.ch, http://xusine.github.io/ |
| Office | INJ 238 |
| Office Hours | Tuesday 15:00-17:00 |
| Admin. Assistant | Stephanie Baillargues |
| stephanie.baillargues /at/ epfl.ch | |
| Office | INJ 234 |
Advanced Multiprocessor Architecture
We have witnessed four decades of Moore's law (scaling chips in density) accompanied with Dennard scaling -- i.e., a reduction of voltages that would allow for larger chips with minimal to no increase in total power. Unfortunately, Dennard scaling has slowed down (starting mid-2000's) forcing designers to divide chips up into multiple processing cores. Thus, multiprocessors became the defacto building blocks for all computers. Recently, the advent of machine learning has led to the adoption of accelerators. The result is the emergence of heterogeneous computing systems featuring multiprocessors and accelerators. This course will build upon the fundamental concepts offered in computer architecture and introduction to parallel architectures to cover modern design techniques as well as projections of designs into the next decade. We will cover topics as diverse as modern memory hierarchies and interconnects, GPUs, and machine learning accelerators.
Topics addressed by this course include:
- Metrics and Methodology
- Parallel Software Construction
- Communication Models
- Applications and Workloads
- Cache Coherence
- Memory Ordering
- CMP Caches
- DRAM Caches
- GPUs
- Interconnects
- Cloud-Native CPUs
- Cloud-Native Accelerators
- AI Accelerators
- Near-memory Computing
- Cloud-Native Memory Hierarchies
- Cloud-Native Network
- Sustainable architecture
Who should take CS 471?
CS 471 is a graduate course and is highly recommended for master and PhD students. Like other graduate-level courses, the course includes weekly readings, discussions, and questions on papers of seminal and recent contributions to the field of computer architecture. The course also includes a research project, in which students study, improve, and evaluate multiprocessor innovations. A list of project ideas will be given out, but students can suggest and work on their own ideas with potentials for advancing the state of the art. Feedback on performance will be given only upon request by a student.
Attendance
You are responsible for all the material covered in class including handouts and class notes. There will be no recitation classes. If you are unable to appear for an exam for any reason, you must contact Prof. Falsafi before the exam.
Recommended Prerequisites
- CS-208 Computer architecture / Architecture des ordinateurs
- CS-206 Parallelism and concurrency
- CS-307 Introduction to multiprocessor architecture
- CS-470 Advanced Computer Architecture (Recommended)
Project
The course contains a research project due at the end of the semester. The project handout will be distributed in the first week of the semester. You will have to find a project partner and conduct research in groups.
Homework
There will be homework regarding the reading materials taught in the lecture. You need to read the corresponding paper and answer related questions precisely and concisely. Each homework and its deadline will be announced during lecture, and we do not accept late submission.
Grading
A tentative breakdown of the grades (subject to change) is given below:
|
Homework Project Midterm Final |
25% 25% 25% 25% |