6.911 - Architectures Anonymous

Class 1 - February 1

• Distributed Computing
  • The Beowulf Underground
  • An Overview of the Intel TFLOPS Supercomputer

Class 2 - February 8

• NUMA
• Memory Consistency Models
  • Aries Website - Links -> Papers -> Memory Consistency Models

Class 3 - February 15

• SIMD
  • The Design of the Connection Machine
  • Norm Margolus, An embedded DRAM architecture for large-scale spatial-lattice computations, submitted to ISCA 2000
• Vector / Stream / Signal Processing
  • NEC SX-5 Technologies Web Page

Class 4 - February 22

• Networks
  • Performance Analysis of k-ary n-cube Interconnection Networks, William J. Dally, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 39, No. 6, June 1990, pp. 775-785
  • Express Cubes: Improving the Performance of k-ary n-cube Interconnection Networks, William J. Dally, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 40, No. 9, Sept. 1991, pp. 1016-1023
• Programming Big Iron
  • NESL (Nested parallel programming language) homepage, including primers, an online NESL interpreter, published papers, etc.
  • CILK project homepage, including all sorts of goodies.
  • pH (parallel Haskell) homepage , including, of course, lots of great stuff.
  • C. A. R. Hoare. "Hints on Programming Language Design", Stanford Report STAN-CS-73-403, 1973. In Essays in Computing Science Prentice-Hall 1989.
  • Andrew Xu, Barbara Liksov, A Design for a Fault-Tolerant, Distributed Implementation of Linda, Proc. 19^th International Symposium on Fault-Tolerant Computing, 1989, pp. 199-206

Class 5 - February 29

• Processing in Memory
• Data Prefetching / Decoupled Access-Execute Architectures

Class 6 - March 7

• VLIW
  • Transmeta MDR article; contains die shots, block diagrams and some info on the instruction formats.
• Multithreading

Class 7 - March 14

• Reconfigurable Hardware
• Dataflow

Class 8 - March 28

• Tagged / Capability Machines
• Transactional / Speculative Computation

Class 9 - April 4

• Analogue Computers
  • Hans-Andrea Loeliger, Felix Tarkoy, Felix Lustenberger, Markus Helfenstein, Decoding in Analog VLSI, IEEE Communications Magazine, April 1999, pp. 99-101
• Fault Tolerant Computers

Class 10 - April 11

• Power
• Packaging
• Video of a talk by Seymour Cray

Class 11 - April 25

• Reversible Computing
• Amorphous Computing

Class 12 - May 1

• The Aries Project (J.P., Jeremy and bunnie)

Class 13 - May 8

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