6.911 - Architectures Anonymous

Lecture Notes and Papers


Intel 4004
Chimaera logic block
J-machine
M-machine
MARS Router
Torus Routing Chip
Cray T3D
Network Design Frame
Reliable Router
MDP chip

Class 1 - February 1

Class 2 - February 8

Class 3 - February 15

Class 4 - February 22

Class 5 - February 29

Class 6 - March 7

  • VLIW (Aaron Adler) (slides) (writeup)
  • Multithreading (David Golombek) (slides)
  • Summary of Dataflow (Jeremy)
    • Arvind and Stephen Brobst. The evolution of dataflow architectures: from static dataflow to P-RISC. International Journal of High Speed Computing, Volume 5, Number 2, June 1993, pp. 125-153.
    • Robert Iannucci. Toward a dataflow / von Neumann hybrid architecture. Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) 1988, pages 131-140.
    • David Culler. Resource requirements of Dataflow Programs. Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) 1988, pages 141-150.

Class 7 - March 14

  • Reconfigurable Hardware (Mike Phillips) (writeup)
  • Dataflow (J.P. Grossman) (presentation slides)
  • Summary of tagged/ capability machines (Jeremy; no slides)
  • Summary of transactional / speculative computation (Jeremy; no slides)
    • Knight, TF. "An architecture for mostly functional languages." ACM Lisp and Functional Programming Conference, August, 1986. (Also see the patent "System and method for parallel processing with mostly functional languages".)
    • Lance Hammond, Mark Willey, and Kunle Olukotun. Data Speculation Support for a Chip Multiprocessor . Proceedings of the Eighth ACM Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, San Jose, California, October 1998.
    • Gray J. The transaction concept: virtues and limitations. [Conference Paper] Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Very Large Data Bases. IEEE. 1981, pp.144-54. New York, NY, USA.
    • David Patrick Reed. Naming and synchronization in a decentralized computer system. PhD Thesis, MIT LCS, 1978.

Class 8 - March 28

Class 9 - April 4

Class 10 - April 11

Class 11 - April 25

Class 12 - May 1

Class 13 - May 8

  • Biological Computation (Tom Knight)
  • Quantum Computing (Norm Margolus)