AIMS AND CONTENT

LEARNING OUTCOMES

The student will acquire the necessary skills to understand how high-level programs are translated into the language of computers.

The choice of instruction set architecture is a key aspect. It was decided to adopt the RISC-V architecture as it offers a simple, elegant, modern, open source model of growing interest even in the non-academic field. At the end of the course the student will be able to:
write and interpret simple RISC-V assembler programs;
understand how a computer translates a high-level language into machine language;
analyze program performance considering aspects such as efficient use of cache, vectorization, and multithreaded programming;
use a compiler effectively.

Furthermore students will acquire basic skills on learning to learn, basic personal and social skills through didactics for groups, cases/problems

TEACHING METHODS

Lectures, classroom exercises, ongoing assignment with delivery and evaluation.
Instant polling will be used for self-assessment and didactics for groups and cases/problems.

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

The RISC-V processor

• RISC-V ISA
• Representation of instructions in the computer
• The main instructions
• Operands and addresses
• Translating and starting a program (assembler, linker, loader)
   

Memory hierarchy

• Organization of memories, temporal and spatial locality
• Basic principles and performance of cache memories
   

Modern processors

• Pipelining and hazards in Risc-V architecture
• Parallelism at the word level
• Instruction level parallelism
• Vector processors
• Hardware multithreading
• Introduction to GPUs

Students will acquire basic skills on: learning to learn, social and personal competence

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

David A Patterson John L Hennessy
Struttura e progetto dei calcolatori Progettare con RISC-V
Seconda edizione italiana
ISBN: 9788808199669

TEACHERS AND EXAM BOARD

LESSONS

Class schedule

The timetable for this course is available here: Portale EasyAcademy