CS221W. Architecture and Operating Systems

Prerequisites: introduction to computer science (any implementation of CS103 or CS112), discrete structures (CS106 or CS115)

Syllabus:

• Digital logic and digital systems: Fundamental building blocks; logic expressions, minimization, sum of product forms; register transfer notation; physical considerations
• Machine level representation of data: Bits, bytes, and words; numeric data representation and number bases; fixed- and floating-point systems; signed and twos-complement representations; representation of nonnumeric data; representation of records and arrays
• Assembly level machine organization: Basic organization of the von Neumann machine; control unit; instruction fetch, decode, and execution; instruction sets and types; assembly/machine language programming; instruction formats; addressing modes; subroutine call and return mechanisms; I/O and interrupts
• Memory system organization and architecture: Storage systems and their technology; coding, data compression, and data integrity; memory hierarchy; main memory organization and operations; latency, cycle time, bandwidth, and interleaving; cache memories; virtual memory; fault handling and reliability
• Functional organization: Implementation of simple datapaths; control unit; instruction pipelining; introduction to instruction-level parallelism
• Overview of operating systems: Role and purpose of the operating system; history of operating system development; functionality of a typical operating system; mechanisms to support client-server models, hand-held devices; design issues; influences of security, networking, multimedia, windows
• Operating system principles: Structuring methods; abstractions, processes, and resources; concepts of application program interfaces; applications needs and the evolution of hardware/software techniques; device organization; interrupts; concept of user/system state and protection, transition to kernel mode
• Concurrency: dispatching and context switching; the role of interrupts; concurrent execution; the "mutual exclusion" problem and some solutions
• Scheduling and dispatch: Preemptive and nonpreemptive scheduling; schedulers and policies; processes and threads
• Memory management: Review of physical memory and memory management hardware; overlays, swapping, and partitions; paging and segmentation; placement and replacement policies; working sets and thrashing; caching

Units covered:

AR1	Digital logic and digital systems	3	core hours (of 6)
AR2	Machine level representation of data	3	core hours
AR3	Assembly level machine organization	9	core hours
AR4	Memory system organization and architecture	5	core hours
AR6	Functional organization	7	core hours
OS1	Overview of operating systems	2	core hours
OS2	Operating system principles	2	core hours
OS3	Concurrency	2	core hours (of 6)
OS4	Scheduling and dispatch	2	core hours (of 3)
OS5	Memory management	5	core hours

Notes:
[to be supplied]

Online resources for CS221W