Time and Location: Tuesday/Thursday 3:30PM-4:50PM, Tucker Hall 222
Instructor: Adwait Jog (Personal Website)
Office hours: Tues/Thu 10:30AM-noon or by appointment, McGl 111
Email: adwait@cs.wm.edu
Deadlines: Sep 4 (add/drop deadline) and Oct 23 (withdraw deadline)
Students are expected to have a good understanding of the basic computer organization and design. Please talk to the instructor if you do not satisfy this requirement.
This is a seminar-type graduate course, where we will discuss research papers on many different topics (e.g., cache or memory systems, scheduling, resource management, micro-architecture, emerging technologies/architectures) in the broad areas of computer architecture and systems. Students are expected to read a variety of papers, critique them, and present them in the front of the class. In addition, students are expected to complete a semester-long research project.
Paper critiques and homeworks: 20%
In-Class Presentations: 30%
Semester-long Research Project: 50%
Critique and Homework Submissions via Email.
In-Class Presentations will be uploaded on the Box folder (shared with students).
Semester-long Research Project Report Submissions need to be emailed to the instructor.
Final Grade submission via Banner.
All students are required to submit a detailed critique for each paper we discuss in the class. However, the student who presents the paper in-class is not required to submit the critique for that particular paper. Deadline for critique submission is one week from when the paper is discussed completely in the class. Please submit them in the PDF format.
Submission Format: Each critique should not exceed one-page and must consists of four sections: 1) paper summary (2-3 lines), 2) strengths (2-3 lines), 3) weaknesses (2-3 lines), and 4) detailed comments (rest of the page). More details are already discussed in class and associated slides are submitted to the box folder (shared with students).
To learn the background material related to each new topic, some homeworks will also be given.
No collaboration is allowed on critiques and homeworks.
Each student will present a maximum of two papers throughout the semester. If you plan to audit the course, you are required to present at least two papers. When you present a paper, be prepared to answer a variety of questions asked by the instructor or other fellow students. The goal is to make class lively. A list of papers will be provided to students. They can choose from that list or come up with their own suggestions. Suggestions would need approval from the instructor.
In-Class Paper Presentations: I expect students to first present necessary
background (~15 minutes) and then paper details (~25 minutes). The remaining
time will be for discussion driven by the fellow students and the instructor.
Students are expected to perform a semester-long research
project. All projects need to be approved by the instructor. Students can
work in groups if they wish, but not more than 2 students are allowed to be
in a single group. If two people choose to work on the same project,
the instructor will need a list of individual contributions made by each of you two,
when you submit your final report. Please contact the instructor early
to brainstorm potential project ideas.
Project Timeline
Phase 1 – Project Determination: (Deadline: Sept. 22); Please send an email to the instructor by
the deadline containing: 1) Project Name (think of this as your paper/report title), 2) Problem Statement,
3) Expected Infrastructure Platform Required, 4) Possible Outcomes and Deliverables.
Phase 2 – Determination of (more) concrete project goals and Infrastructure Setup (Deadline: Oct 20); Please meet the instructor during office hours to discuss the status of your project.
Phase 3 – Motivation Results (Deadline: Nov 19); Please meet the instructor during office hours to discuss the status of your project.
Phase 4 – Final Project Report (Deadline: Dec 11); Please email your final project report in PDF format. Please use the standard LaTeX or Word ACM templates. The PDF should have these sections: 1) Problem Statement, 2) Introduction, 3) Background and Related Work, 4) Motivation Results, 5) Implementation Details, 6) Infrastructure Details, 7) Final Results, and 8) Conclusions.
Core Design
Memory Systems
Near-Data Computing
Accelerators
Approximate Computing
Emerging Memory/Storage Technologies
Mobile Architectures
Data Center Architectures
Hardware Security
Reliability and Dependable Systems
Emerging Architectures: Quantum and DNA Architectures
Only for In-Class Presentations: Ideally, the instructor wants every student to choose
a different topic for in-class presentations. To achieve this, the instructor asks for
three topic preferences (in order) from every student. Deadline to give preferences
(via email) is Sept 22
Only for Project: Students are free to choose any project topic area(s). Their project can also
cross different topics. Again, please contact the instructor early to brainstorm potential project
ideas. Deadline to determine project topic area is also Sept 22
Complete Reading List can be found here (Google Doc Link).
Useful Simulators/Tools
GEM5, A Full System CPU Simulator
MARSSx86, A Full System CPU Simulator
McPAT, A power, area, and timing modeling framework
Sniper, A Parallel/Fast CPU Simulator
zsim, Another Fast CPU Simulator
GPGPU-Sim, A GPU Simulator (models NVIDIA-style GPUs). Also, look at GPU-Wattch, A GPU Power Model
Multi2sim, A CPU/GPU Simulator (models AMD-style GPUs)
CPU-GPU Simulator, A Trace/Execution Driven CPU-GPU Heterogeneous Architecture Simulator
GemDroid, A Mobile Architecture Simulator (GEM5 + Android Emulator)
| Date | Agenda | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 27 | Administrativia and Introductions | HW 0 Out |
| Sep 1 | Overview: Core Design, Memory Systems, and Near Data Computing. | HW 0 Due, HW1 Out |
| Sep 3 | Overview: Simulators, Accelerators (contd.). | Sep 4 is add/drop deadline |
| Sep 8 | Overview: Accelerators (contd.), Approx Computing | |
| Sep 10 | Overview: Approx Computing, Emerging Memory Technology | |
| Sep 15 | Overview: Mobile Architectures | HW1 Due |
| Sep 17 | Overview: Data Center Architectures | |
| Sep 22 | Overview: Security and Reliability | Project Determination and In-Class Presentation Topic Selection Deadline |
| Sep 24 | Presenter: James Bieron, Paper: [P1] | In-class Presentations Start |
| Sep 29 | Presenter: Shengye Wan, Paper: [P2] | |
| Oct 1 | Presenter: Qingsen Wang, Paper: [P3] | Critique [P1] Due |
| Oct 6 | Presenter: Rongdong Chai, Paper: [P4] | Instructor on Travel, Critique [P2] Due |
| Oct 8 | Class Canceled, Instead watch this video on "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming | Instructor on Travel, Critique [P3] Due |
| Oct 13 | No Class, Fall Break | |
| Oct 15 | Presenter: Haonan Wang, Paper: [P5] | Critique [P4] Due |
| Oct 17 | Presenter: Lihua Ren, Paper: [P6] | |
| Oct 22 | Presenter: Fan Luo, Paper: [P7] | Critique [P5] Due |
| Oct 24 | Presenter: Ruiqin Tian, Paper: [P8] | Critique [P6] Due |
| Oct 27 | Presenter: Lele Ma, Paper: [P9] | Critique [P7] Due |
| Nov 3 | Presenter: Bin Nie, Paper: [P10] | Critique [P8] Due |
| Nov 5 | Presenter: Yiqiang Lin, Paper: [P11] | Critique [P9] Due |
| Nov 10 | Presenters: Jamie Bieron and Shengye Wan, Papers: [P12] and [P13] | Critique [P10] Due |
| Nov 12 | Presenters: Qingsen Wang and Rongdong Chai, Papers: [P14] and [P15] | Critique [P11] Due |
| Nov 17 | Presenters: Haonan Wang and Lihua Ren, Papers: [P16] and [P17] | |
| Nov 19 | Presenters: Fan Luo and Ruiqin Tian, Papers: [P18] and [P19] | |
| Nov 24 | Presenters: Lele Ma and Bin Nie, Papers: [P20] and [P21] | |
| Nov 26 | No Class, Thanks giving break | |
| Dec 1 | Presenter: Yiqiang Lin, Paper: [P22]. Project Discussions | |
| Dec 3 | Project Discussions | Final Project Report is due on Dec 11 |
P1: MorphCore: An Energy-Efficient Micro-architecture for High Performance ILP and High Throughput TLP, MICRO 2012
P2: Memory Performance Attacks, USENIX Security 2007
P3: PIM-Enabled Instructions: A Low-Overhead, Locality-Aware Processing-in-Memory Architecture, ISCA 2015
P4: Scheduling Heterogeneous Multi-Cores through Performance Impact Estimation (PIE), ISCA 2012
P5: A Locality-Aware Memory Hierarchy for Energy-Efficient GPU Architectures, MICRO 2013
P6: Paragon: QoS-Aware Scheduling for Heterogeneous Datacenters, ASPLOS 2013
P7: WebCore: Architectural Support for Mobile Web Browsing, ISCA 2014
P8: A Study of Mobile Device Utilization, ISPASS 2015
P9: CloudMonatt: an architecture for security health monitoring and attestation of virtual machines in cloud computing, ISCA 2015
P10 An Experimental Study of Data Retention Behavior in Modern DRAM Devices: Implications for Retention Time Profiling Mechanisms, ISCA 2013
P11 Neural Acceleration for General-Purpose Approximate Programs, MICRO 2012
P12 Composite Cores: Pushing Heterogeneity into a Core, MICRO 2012
P13 ATLAS: A Scalable and High-Performance Scheduling Algorithm for Multiple Memory Controllers, HPCA 2010
P14 RowClone: Fast and Energy-Efficient In-DRAM Bulk Data Copy and Initialization, MICRO 2013
P15 Exploiting ILP, TLP, and DLP with the Polymorphous TRIPS Architecture, ISCA 2003
P16 Page Placement Strategies for GPUs within Heterogeneous Memory Systems, ASPLOS 2015
P17 Quasar: Resource-Efficient and QoS-Aware Cluster Management, ASPLOS 2014
P18 High-Performance and Energy-Efficient Mobile Web Browsing on Big/Little Systems, HPCA 2013
P19 Quantifying the Energy Cost of Data Movement for Emerging Smart Phone Workloads on Mobile Platforms, IISWC 2014
P20 Efficient Memory Integrity Verification and Encryption for Secure Processors, MICRO 2003
P21 The Efficacy of Error Mitigation Techniques for DRAM Retention Failures: A Comparative Experimental Study, SIGMETRICS 2014
P22 SAGE: Self-Tuning Approximation on Graphics Engines, MICRO 2013
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