Course Computer Systems

"Computersystemen"

This is the information of year 2014

The site of the previous year can be found here.

Description

The official description of course baiCOSY06 can be found (in Dutch) here.

Literature

The course is based on the book Computer Systems: A programmer's perspective, 2nd edition by R.E. Bryant and D.R. O'Hallaron. Notice that our course is based on the USA edition, the international edition has one chapter less (and a confusion layout). This year we recomment to use the electronic edition. The book has also a student site with additional material. In addition, the module 'computerarchitecture' of the book 'Van 0 en 1 tot pipeline processor' will be covered. This syllabus can be bought at the educational office.

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Schedule

The official schedule can be changed any moment. Please report when you discover a difference with the schedule on this page. The course is scheduled in week 36-43.

Students, who want to work ahead or who were not able to attend a lecture, can listen to the recordings of my lectures. Download Lecturnity Player and listen to lecture, synchronized with the sheets. The last hour of each day the teaching assistants will assist with the assignments. The course is given in 6 weeks, so note that in some weeks more than chapter is covered (and should be read).

Chapter	Topic	Week	remark
1	Tour of systems	36
2	Data representation	36
3	Machine language	37	Program Control in C
4	Processor Architecture	38	Data representation in C
5	Code Optimization	38-40
6	Memory hierarchy	40-41
7	Linking
8	Exceptional control flow	42
9	Virtual memory	41
10	System-level I/O	42
11	Network programming	42
12	Concurrent programming	42

This are the list of assignments during the course

• Tuesday week 36 - Tuesday week 37: L1 - Datalab, Makefile
• Friday week 36: P1 - 'Rekenmachine' (H1-H3).
• Friday week 37: P2 - Harvard machine (H7-H8).
• Wednesday week 37 - Thursday week 38: L2 - Bomblab
• Friday week 38: P3 - Pipelining (H9).

• Tuesday week 40 - Tuesday week 41: L3 - Cache Performance lab
• Friday week 40: P4 - Function calls (H10).
• Wednesday week 41 - Thursday week 42: L4 - Proxylab
• Friday week 41: P5 - Caching (H11).
• Wednesday and Thursday week 42: P6 - Accumulatormachine in hardware (H12)

This are the list of recordings of the lectures:

• Monday Sept 5, 2011: Insight needed (this year not recorded).
• Monday Sept 5, 2011: Tour of the System (this year not recorded).
• Monday Sept 3, 2012: Bits and Bytes.
• Thursday Sept 6, 2012: Floats I, Floats II.

• Monday Sept 10, 2012: Machine Basics I and Machine Basics II.
• Thursday Sept 13, 2012: Data Structures in C.

• Monday Sept 19, 2011: Instruction Set Architecture
• Monday Sept 19, 2011: 64 Bits Machine Basics
• Wednesday Sept 21, 2011: Control in C
• Thursday Sept 22, 2011: Data Structures in C.
• Thursday Sept 22, 2011: Procedures

• Monday Oct 3, 2011: Machine Independent Code Optimalization
• Wednesday Oct 5, 2011: Machine Dependent Code Optimalization
• Thursday Oct 6, 2011: The memory hierarchy (part1 & part2)

• Monday Oct 10, 2011: Cache characteristics and Virtual memory as cache
• Wednesday Oct 12, 2011: Digital Methoden (Computer Architecture)
• Thursday Oct 13, 2011: Digitale Methoden (Computer Architecture)

• Monday Oct 17, 2011: Processes.
• Wednesday Oct 19, 2011: Webservices and concurrency.
• Wednesday Oct 20, 2011: MultiCore.

These lectures were recorded with the Lecturnity Studio. Download Lecturnity Player and listen to lecture, synchronized with the sheets. Note that this recordings are converted to the official version, and can now be played on Windows, Mac and Linux.

From the book, we have covered the following sections:

• H1
  
• H2
  
• H3
  
• H4.3.1, H4.4, 4.5.6-4.5.8, 4.5.12,
  ---------------------First Exam-------------
• H5.1-5.10, 5.13-5.15
  
• H6.1.4, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4.6, 6.4.7, 6.5, 6.6, pp. 639 & pp.649 "aside"s,
  
• H8.1-8.5.1, 8.7, 8.8
  
• H9.1-9.5, 9.7.2, 9.8.1-3, 9.11, 9.12
  
• H10.3, H10.4, H10.6, H10.8-10
  
• H11.3.3, 11.4-11.7
  
• H12.3-12.6
  

Previous exams:

• September 2014
• October 2013
• September 2013
• October 2012
• September 2012
• October 2011
• September 2011
• March 2010
• July 2009
• March 2009
• December 2007
• October 2006
• October 2005
• October 2004

See also the exam page (including solutions) from CMU.

Evaluation

The course was in the previous year evaluated by the participants with a 6.9:

.

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Inheritance

In the old days, when the title Bachelors didn't exist yet at Dutch Universities a different course was given, by a different teacher, and with another focus. Still, much can be learned from the course 'Operating- and Distributed systems'.

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Links

• Introduction to Computer Systems, Fall 2014, Greg Kesden, Greg Ganger and Dave O'Hallaron, CMU.
• Introduction to Computer Systems, Summer 2014, Greg Kesden, CMU.
• Introduction to Computer Systems, Fall 2013, Greg Kesden, Randy Bryant, Dave O'Hallaron, CMU.
• Introduction to Computer Systems, Fall 2012, Greg Kesden, Greg Ganger, Dave O'Hallaron, CMU.
• Introduction to Computer Systems, Fall 2011, Greg Kesden, Greg Ganger, Dave O'Hallaron, CMU.
• Computer Systems Lab, Spring 2011, Stefan Freudenberger & Thomas Gross, ETHZ.
• Computer Systems Lab, Spring 2010, Stefan Freudenberger & Thomas Gross, ETHZ.
• Computer Systems Lab, Spring 2009, Stefan Freudenberger & Thomas Gross, ETHZ.
• Computer Systems Lab, Spring 2007, Matteo Corti & Thomas Gross, ETHZ.
• Author's blogspot.

Last updated October 15, 2014.

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This web-page and the list of participants to this course is maintained by Arnoud Visser (a.visser@uva.nl)
Faculty of Science
University of Amsterdam