2110793 Advanced Topics in Digital Systems 2011

Syllabus

This course concentrates on the components and architecture of modern supercomputers. The topics of interest includes basic digital systems, embedded systems, modern servers, cluster computers. Review and hand-on for basics such as digital circuits, assembly language and embeded systems, will be covered. Advanced topics basic on the future exaflop machines will be discussed.

Assesment

homework          20%
midterm project   30%
final                     50%

Announcements

...

Topics

Exaflop machine
(basics)
Logic
CPU
Assembly
Embedded systems
---------------------------
(current research in architecture)
Energy
Processor
Memory
Network
Special

Lecture

basics
digital circuits
logic   slide 1       slide 2     computer arithmetic
Combinational circuits, Sequential circuits, Synchronous, Asynchronous
integrated circuit design    semiconductor device fabrication (wiki)
Digital Integrated Circuits, design and manufacturing process (ppt by J. M. Rabaey, A. Chandrakasan, B. Nikolic)
t-machine    specification,   microprogram simulator (tm.c)
Cache memory
Content Addressable Memory ieee-article    intro-website
Content Addressable Memories by Vahid Tabatabaee Fall 2007, U. of Maryland ( ppt )
Exascale computing (ppt )
Quantum Computer programming:   ....
Future Internet: Internet of Things :
   Chen, Yen-Kuang, "Challenges and Opportunities of Internet of Things," Design Automation Conference, 2012, pp.383 - 388 ( pdf )
   Atzori, L., Iera, A., Morabito, G., "SIoT: Giving a Social Structure to the Internet of Things," IEEE Communications Letters, November 2011, Vol 15, Issue 11, pp.1193 - 1195   ( pdf )

Homework

1)   Read the article "the top in flops" (link below) and prepare to discuss it in class.
2)   Draw a logic diagram of a full adder.
3)   Use Logic Works to create a 4-bit serial adder.   Prepare the file of your design to be shown in the class.
4)   Write a simulator for T-machine at microprogram level.
5)   Perform experiment on Cache design with the given trace. small    large
      Small trace:    total trace 20220, instruction 177918, data 24282.
      Large trace:
             This is a trace of a compiler, Som v. 4.1, compiles itself. See this page for the detail about the compiler
              http://www.cp.eng.chula.ac.th/~piak/project/som/index.htm
              The trace file is trx.zip (5 Mbytes). When unzip it is ~100Mbytes.
              each line contains an address xxx {r,w} r is read w is write
              data is at 0..371192
               instruction is at 400000..410873
               total number of instruction executed is 4520058
               total number of data access is 1044647.
6) Read and prepare to present from the reference The Opportunities and Challenges of Exascale Computing

Tools

Logic Works 5 (get it from here, 11 Mbytes) Just unzip it, no need to "install".
Cache design experiment with small trace cache.zip

Reference

Exaflop machine The full report TR-2008-13.pdf (3 Mb)
The Opportunities and Challenges of Exascale Computing, (pdf 2 Mb) US Department of Energy, Fall 2010
If you want to get your hands dirty, try the do these simple projects (on digital circuits) http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_6/chpt_7/1.html
(You probably can substitute the CMOS circuit by TTL, 74xx series which is available in Thailand)

The tops in flops

Kogge, P.
Page(s): 48 - 54
Digital Object Identifier : 10.1109/MSPEC.2011.5693074

last update 13 March 2012