Classes

Each week you should attend three hours of lectures, a two-hour practical class (which may include some tutorial work) and be prepared to work outside of class times too. For details of days, times and rooms consult the timetables webpage.

(But, to be a little more helpful than that, comp226 lectures take place on Wednesdays from 6 to 9 in the evening, and comp226 prac and tutorial classes are available on Monays and Fridays starting at 6pm (you choose one day) for two hours and are held in E6A 123 or 121.)

Note that there will be no tutorial or practical classes on the Monday of week 1, but there is tutorial work for everyone to do in week 1 which will be discussed in the first lecture, and there is a Friday evening practical class.

Please note that you are required to attend prac classes to have work marked, and you are required to submit work including tutorial work.

Required and Recommended Texts and/or Materials

You are expected to use the following text book:

• P&H: D.A. Patterson and J.L. Hennessy, Computer Organisation and Design, The Hardware Software Interface, Revsied Fourth Edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 2011.

The following books are reference books and may be useful in some parts of the course:

• H&P: J.L. Hennessy and D.A. Patterson, Computer Architecture - A Quantitative Approach. Morgan Kaufmann, Third Edition, 2003, or later.
• M&H: Miles J. Murdocca and Vincent P. Heuring, Principles of Computer Architecture. Prentice-Hall, 2000.
• B.W. Kernighan and D.M. Ritchie, The C Programming Language. Second Edition, Prentice-Hall, 1988, or later.

There is also a companion website for the text maintained by the publisher books.elsevier.com. They now also offer a link to Google Books from this page for a substantial preview.

Unit Webpage and Technology Used and/or Required

Unit Web Page

The web page for this unit can be found at http://www.comp.mq.edu.au/~mike/comp226. Note that the majority of the unit materials will be openly accessible from that page.

Echo360 discouraged

Lectures are an interactive experience - we expect you to attend and to be involved. We don't think of lectures as some encapsulated information transmission. They should be useful learning experiences, and we'll do our best to make them that for you. If matters beyond your control force you to miss a lecture please review the material available, read another student's notes, and then come and talk to us -- we do much better reviews of lecture content than echo360, and we like to help.  So, while some lecture content may be recorded, we make no guarantees that Echo360 recordings will be provided for each lecture, nor that they will prove useful to you.

The following is the plan for lectures. NOTE: The actual presentation arrangements may vary - please refer to the Lecture topic list on the unit website for up-to-date information.

Grading requirements apply to this unit.

To achieve a pass grade, you must demonstrate pass level achievement of the relevant learning outcomes in the final examination and you must demonstrate overall achievement suitable for a pass level grade.

If you do not submit a satisfactory attempt for all of the assignments, we can require you to complete additional work in order to pass the unit.  Similarly, if you do not submit a reasonable attempt to at least ten tutorials and at least ten practicals, we can require you to complete suitable additional work in order to pass the unit.  If you do not complete the required additional work, you will fail the unit.

All work submitted should be readable and well presented.

You should never commit plagiarism in any of your submitted work, including tutorial and practical answers.

From week 2, some tutorial questions will be identified as "Hand-in" questions. You should complete these questions before the tutorial and submit your solution no later than 5:50pm on Mondays in the tutorial submission box for COMP226 on the ground floor of building E6A. Always keep a copy of your work that you can bring to the tutorial with you for the discussion.  Tutorial 2 is due on the Monday of week 2, Tutorial 3 on the Monday of week 3, and so on.

This information does not fit neatly into the Units structure, so it appears here in a separate section.  It is just as important as the rest of the unit outline.

Why Study Computer Architecture?

In addition to the obvious fact that "computer architecture is fun and interesting" we'd like to point out that understanding computer architecture is helpful for efficient programming (which is discussed in this unit), for Operating System design (see COMP342: Operating Systems) and for compiler design (see COMP332: Programming Languages). The unit treats assembly-language programming in detail.

Learning Outcomes

Above, we have identified the specific learning outcomes of COMP226, but we really want you to understand the key learning objective of this unit which is:

• To understand the computer (not just to know how to make it do things).

Of course, that involves the specific outcomes listed above, but it is a more fundamental concept.  We want you to be able to work with computers, knowing how they are designed, how they work, and how that impacts what they can do.

Broader Understandings

In addition to the specific learning outcomes listed above, this unit will help you develop a broader understanding of computing including the following:

1. Developing a detailed understanding of many of the driving forces in the profession of computing, and how they have led to the hardware we use.
2. A deeper insight into professional practice. As professionals, computing graduates are expected to have much deeper knowledge than merely how to make things work. Professionals need to understand the subject in a broad sense. This understanding equips graduates to be able to make decisions many years hence, long after current technology has been superseded.
3. A view of some of the social issues related to computing, especially those related to hardware and operating systems.
4. A generic understanding of assembly language and machine code. We will study SPARC, but the concepts you learn will be applicable to many other extant and future architectures.
5. And a very important technical generic skill: You will learn precisely how what you write in a program is executed by a machine, and hence how apparently reasonable high level language (HLL) code can be highly inefficient or can introduce intermittent and very hard to correct bugs.

Graduate Capabilities - More Details

In addition to the discipline-based learning objectives, all academic programs at Macquarie seek to develop students' Graduate Capabilities in a range of areas. As listed above, one of the aims of this unit is that students develop their

• Critical analysis skills;
• Problem-solving skills;
• Creativity and innovation;

But you will develop other useful skills also. For example, we expect you to be proficient note-takers in lectures -- that is a very important skill for your future because you will frequently need to take concise but precise notes in meetings, discussions, or even just of your own plans and ideas. In comp226 we will also try to get you a little used to dealing with ambiguity. In your future life, specs will rarely be as carefully worked out as they are for first year assignments. Now we expect you to apply intelligence in interpreting specs. Similarly we provide a wide range of materials that are relevant to computer architecture study, and we expect you to take control of your learning and take advantage of those that are appropriate for your own state of knowledge.

In addition, as with most computing units you will develop your project management skills, communication skills, and quality assurance skills in completing assignment work, and you will gain insight into yourself, and how you work most effectively.

Assessment Tasks

Deadlines are firm in this unit and you should ensure that you can submit your assignment work (even if it is incomplete) on time. Late work will not be accepted unless due to illness or misadventure. If you cannot submit on time because of illness or other circumstances, please contact the lecturer before the due date.

If serious illness or misadventure prevents you completing your work on time, you should contact us as soon as possible. We may make special arrangements for you to meet the requirements of the work, or we may set you alternative work or we may set you an extra exam. In any case, you should make every effort to submit, before the due date, what you have achieved and you should contact the lecturer before the due date.

You are encouraged to:

• set your personal deadline earlier than the actual one;
• keep backups of all your important files;
• make sure that no-one else picks up your printouts.

Late work will not be accepted. If you cannot submit on time because of illness or other circumstances, please contact the lecturer before the due date.