15-740 Fall '97
Notes on Class Material

Course Readings

Information about these are on the Course Readings Page

Class Handouts

List of all class handouts, other than assignments.

• Lecture notes on MIPS programming (Sept. 17 & 19)
  • Adobe acrobat,
  • Postscript.
• Lecture notes on ISA comparison (Sept. 22)
  • Adobe acrobat,
  • Postscript.
  • More information on timings of sparse matrix multiplication on different machines.
• Lecture notes on Pipelined MIPS Implementation (Sept. 24 & 26)
  • Adobe acrobat,
  • Postscript.
• Lecture notes on High Performance Processors (Sept. 29)
  • Adobe acrobat,
  • Postscript.
• Lecture notes on Instruction Level Parallelism (Oct. 1)
  • Adobe acrobat,
  • Postscript.
• Lecture notes on Superscalar Processors (Oct. 3)
  • Adobe acrobat,
  • Postscript.
• Lecture notes on DEC Alpha 21264 (Oct. 6)
  • Adobe acrobat,
  • Postscript.
• Lecture notes on Memory Technology (Oct. 17)
  • Adobe acrobat,
  • Postscript.
• Lecture notes on Multimedia Computing (Nov. 3)
  • Adobe acrobat,
  • Postscript.
• Lecture notes on Shared Memory Multiprocessors (Nov. 19)
  • Adobe acrobat,
  • Postscript.
• Lecture notes on Model Checking (Nov. 21)
  • Adobe acrobat,
  • Postscript.
  • Microsoft Power Point version 4.
• Revised Lecture notes on further issues regarding Shared Memory (Nov. 24)
  • Adobe acrobat,
  • Postscript.
  • Note: these revisions correct the following shortcomings in the cache consistency protocol presented in class:
    • Inconsistent state when cache independently writes back block that home is attempting to fetch.
      • Home would think WRITE message was response to FETCH
      • Fix by defining separate cache commands: WRITEBACK (cache gives up copy of block), and WRITEHOLD (cache shares copy of block).
    • Processor attempts read or write while home is handling read or write request for different processor.
      • Would cause deadlock if home unable to processor READ or XREAD while in one of the "Pending" states
      • Fix is to immediately send NACK (negative acknowledgement) back to requestor.
• Lecture notes on Implementing Network-Based Shared Memory Multiprocessors (Dec. 3)
  • Adobe acrobat,
  • Postscript.
• Lecture notes on Future Technology (Dec. 5)
  • Adobe acrobat,
  • Postscript.

Supplementary Information

• The following document, retrieved from the MIPS WWW site. describes the MIPS instruction set. It describes 4 generations of the instruction set definition, labeled I through IV. For this course, we will stick with the original (MIPS I) version:
  • Adobe acrobat
  • Postscript
• Here's more information on timings of sparse matrix multiplication on different machines.
• My favorite source of information on microprocessors is Microprocessor Report. The subscription price is high, but you get lots of information for your money. The CMU E&S Library has a subscription.