Course Policy

Course Policy

Textbook H&P | Hennessy & Patterson | Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach | 6th Edition

Required readings are posted on the course schedule and they include chapters from this required textbook as well as research papers.

Course Description

The objective of this course is to learn the fundamental aspects of computer architecture design and analysis. Topics include processor design, pipelining, superscalar, out-of-order execution, caches (memory hierarchies), virtual memory, storage systems, simulation techniques, parallel architectures, warehouse scale computing, domain-specific accelerators, and technology trends and future challenges.

Prerequisite

You must have already taken CS/ECE 250 at Duke or equivalent. If you are an ECE MS student, you must have already taken ECE 550.

Office Hours

Professor Wills’s office hours

D304 LSRC, Tuesdays 4.30 pm - 5.15 pm or by appointment. Please sign up on my Calendly. I will not debug students’ code.

TAs’ office hours

Mansi Choudhary: D316 LSRC, Mondays and Wednesdays 3 pm - 4 pm
Guanglei Zhou: 320 Wilkinson, Thursdays 4.30 pm - 5.30 pm and Fridays 4 pm - 5 pm

Course Resources

These are the course resources. Students are expected to keep up with any information disseminated through these resources, i.e., course website, Canvas website, and Ed.

Course Website

This is the main course website. Course schedule is posted here along with required paper readings aside from the textbook chapters.

Canvas

CS 550/ECE 550 Fall 2024 Canvas Website is a supplement to the main course website. Students will find lecture slides and assignments on Canvas. Students will also be able to access the Announcements and the Gradebook from this site.

Ed Discussion

This course uses Ed Discussion for students to post questions about the course. The authors of the posts will be visible to the instructor and TAs even when they are anonymous to students.

Academic Misconduct

Students are expected to adhere to the Duke Community Standard.

I will not tolerate any academic dishonesty. This includes cheating on the assignments, project, exams, summaries and plagiarism on summaries or project. Be especially careful on your project to cite prior work and give proper credit to others’ research. I will refer all suspected cases of cheating to the Gradaute School or Duke Undergraduate Judicial Board as appropriate. Please ask the instructor if you have any questions about misconduct.

Grading

  • 5% Research Paper Summaries
  • 20% Assignments
  • 20% Midterm Exam – Closed Book, Closed Notes, Closed Internet (No Calculators, Phones, and Smart Watches)
  • 30% Final Exam – Closed Book, Closed Notes, Closed Internet
  • 25% Semester Project

Class participation

Students are expected to attend lectures and actively participate in lectures.

Research Paper Summaries

Paper summaries are due at midnight the day before lecture.

Paper summaries should be written individually and be short (2-3 paragraphs) including a description of the problem and motivation, the main ideas/approach of the paper (solution, method, technique), strengths, weaknesses, and at least one question for discussion. It is paraticularly good if you put the ideas of the paper into context with respect to what you’ve learned in the course.

The summaries must be entirely your own words, do not copy abstracts, paragraphs, sentences from the paper or elsewhere.

Summaries are graded as 2, 1, or 0 (2: includes all components and is decent, 1: incomplete or poor, 0: not turned in or turned in late).

Assignments

There are a total of five assignments for this course. Each assignment has a conceptual part and a practical part. The pratical part includes modifying a simulator, running simulation, performing experiments, and analyzing results.

This course requires readings from the textbook and from selected research papers (there is a lot of reading for this class, be prepared…). You will improve your ability to read research papers by the end of this semester. The contents of the textbook readings and research papers will be on exams even if we don’t explicitly cover something in lecture. There will be several class sessions devoted to discussing approximately 12-16 research papers (2-3 each class). Students will write short summaries for each paper prior to the class discussion.

You are expected to complete the assignments individually, unless otherwise stated.

Exams

There will be one midterm exam (in class 75 minutes) and a cumulative final exam (3 hours) in this course.

Semester Project

The course project is expected to be completed in groups of 2-3 students. A project is graded based on a project proposal (10% of the project grade) and a project status report (15% of the project grade), with the remaining grade from a presentation (10% of the project grade) and a final written report (65% of the project grade). Your project can be combined with ongoing research or a project in another course; either of these requires approval from all instructors and advisors involved.

All project documents should conform to the following formatting: 11pt font, single space with 1 inch margins.

Project Proposal

The project proposal should be one page and include a statement of the project goal/hypothesis and an argument about why you think the idea will work (i.e., a well thought out justification).

Project Status Report

Your project status should be 3 pages maximum and include the following items.

  • Statement of project goal/hypothesis
  • List of milestones for project (e.g., simulator development, benchmarks, experiments, etc.)
  • Timeline for completion of milestones
  • Indication of progress on various milestones (e.g., completed, not started, x% complete, etc.)
  • Related work with appropriate citations

Project Final Report

The standard for projects is very high. I expect you to spend a significant amount of time on this project. Your final document is expected to be of conference/workshop caliber in terms of presentation and style (the results aren’t required to be publishable). You should use the papers we read during the semester as guides for style and format. It is important that you clearly articulate the problem, your proposed solution, methodology, and interpretation of results (not just presenting numbers). You should also include sufficient related work with an explanation and understanding of how the related work fits together.

The final report should be at least 10 pages and maximum 11 pages in length.