ACA syllabus

CS2354 ADVANCED COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE             L T P C 3 0 0 3

UNIT I INSTRUCTION LEVEL PARALLELISM 9

ILP – Concepts and challenges – Hardware and software approaches – Dynamic scheduling – Speculation - Compiler techniques for exposing ILP – Branch prediction.

UNIT II MULTIPLE ISSUE PROCESSORS 9

VLIW & EPIC – Advanced compiler support – Hardware support for exposing parallelism – Hardware versus software speculation mechanisms – IA 64 and Itanium processors – Limits on ILP.

UNIT III MULTIPROCESSORS AND THREAD LEVEL PARALLELISM 9

Symmetric and distributed shared memory architectures – Performance issues – Synchronization – Models of memory consistency – Introduction to Multithreading.

UNIT IV MEMORY AND I/O 9

Cache performance – Reducing cache miss penalty and miss rate – Reducing hit time – Main memory and performance – Memory technology. Types of storage devices –Buses – RAID – Reliability, availability and dependability – I/O performance measures –Designing an I/O system.

UNIT V MULTI-CORE ARCHITECTURES 9

Software and hardware multithreading – SMT and CMP architectures – Design issues – Case studies – Intel Multi-core architecture – SUN CMP architecture - heterogenousmulti-core processors – case study: IBM Cell Processor.

TOTAL : 45 PERIODS 56

TEXT BOOK:
1. John L. Hennessey and David A. Patterson, “ Computer architecture – A quantitative approach”, Morgan Kaufmann / Elsevier Publishers, 4th. edition, 2007.
REFERENCES:
1. David E. Culler, Jaswinder Pal Singh, “Parallel computing architecture : A hardware/software approach” , Morgan Kaufmann /Elsevier Publishers, 1999.
2. Kai Hwang and Zhi.Wei Xu, “Scalable Parallel Computing”, Tata McGraw Hill, New Delhi, 2003.

ACA Internal II QP

NEHRU INSTITUTE OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

DEPARMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

INTERNAL EXAM II

 Subject :Advanced Computer Architecture                                                         DATE:

Subject code: CS2354                                                                                        Total Marks : 50 marks

PART A

ANSWER ALL THE QUESTION     

1.       Difference between fine grained and coarse grained multithreading?

2.       What is VLIW processor?

3.       What is sequential consistency?

4.       Disadvantages of symmetric shared memory?

5.       What is cache coherence problem?

PART B

ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS                                                                                                                 (2*12=24)

6 .Explain Distributed shared memory architecture?

Or

Explain Symmetric shared memory Architecture?

7. a. Explain synchronization? (6)

   b. Explain IA 64 architecture?(6)

Or

a.       Explain various memory consistency models(6)

b.      Explain multithreading(6)

                         PART C                                                                        

ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS                                                                                                              (1*16=16)

8. Explain Advanced compiler techniques for exposing ILP(16)

Or

1. Explain IA 64 Architecture(10)
2. Explain storage devices(6)