Computer Organization I

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CDA3100 - Computer Organization I

Fall, 2109

Department of Computer Science, Florida State University

Syllabus

Note for prospective students

Arguably computer revolution is one of the most fundamental ones in the human history and it has changed and will be changing every aspect of the society and human life due to the following reasons:

Separation of the software and hardware allows the same hardware to be used to solve different problems by only changing the software, leading to general purpose computing machines.
Technology advances have led to over 250,000,000,000 improvements in relative performance / unit cost in half a century and no other industry has done so ever.
Computers as machines can perform many orders of magnitudes of operations per unit energy consumed than any other machines, creating a unique cyber space.

During the evolution, numerous innovations have been created, resulting in countless new research areas, new companies, and new job opportunities. As the first course in a two-course sequence on computer organization, this course exposes fundamentals of the exciting computer systems, including building blocks of computer hardware (gates and memory elements), instruction set architectures of computer software (instruction sets and assembly language programming), and design of various components. By gaining much deeper understandings of computer systems, students will be able to lay a solid foundation to further their studies in computer organization, operating systems, compilers, high performance computing, and other areas. Furthermore, this class, along with other ones, prepares computer science major students for job opportunities and research areas otherwise not feasible.

To bridge the gap, the primary goal of this class is to help you understand and master these advanced techniques in cda3100 systems without requiring strong mathematical skills. This is achieved by presenting these techniques through case studies and hands-on experience examples. In particular, the instructor will provide working programs (in Matlab or Java) for the basic algorithms and techniques to be covered in this class. It is the instructor's belief that this class will strenghten your computing skills and make you a much stronger candidate.