Computer Architecture

The primary goal of this course is for you to obtain knowledge and a theoretical understanding of the lower levels of abstraction of a computer system. The secondary goal is to broaden you knowledge of computer science.

• Overview of computing and the relationships among computer components
• Computer history from an architectural point of view
• Number systems (bases and conversion), Data formats, Integer/Floating point representation
• Principles of the von Neumann architecture and Instructional set architecture
• Fetch-Execute cycle, CPU architecture, Paging, and memory access
• CPU organization, design and implementation
• Principles of I/O operation
• System integration and system interconnection, focusing on multiprocessing and clusters

Other topics that may be covered are: abstraction, recursion, stack-relative addressing, language translation principles, finite state machines, operating systems concurrent processes and deadlock, multiprocessing, memory allocation, file allocation, Boolean algebra, logic gates, combinational design and analysis.