CSCI 3160

Introduces students to the fundamental abstractions of computer systems. This course uses hands-on exercises to investigate modern computer architectural features and the system software that supports them.

CSCI 2200 and CSCI 2150, each with a C or better

• Understand how computer systems represent information and programs at the machine level.
• Describe the roles hardware and systems software play in program compilation and execution.
• Evaluate the effect of hardware features and software tools on program performance.
• Discuss the methods for organizing and managing programs in memory.
• Demonstrate techniques for enabling interaction and communication between programs.
• Write systems-level programs in unmanaged programming languages.

• Data and instruction representation
• procedures and stacks
• compilation and linking
• the memory hierarchy and caching
• exceptional control flow
• network programming
• thread-level parallelism
• assembly language
• processor data path, pipelining, and instruction-level parallelism
• code transformations
• dynamic memory allocation
• system-level I/O
• concurrent programming