3F5 Computer and Network Systems 2004-05

University of Cambridge, Department of Engineering
Michaelmas Term 2004

Module leader: Frank Stajano
Lecturers: Frank Stajano (computer systems), Tim Wilkinson (network systems)

Syllabus

The official page maintained by the Teaching Office lists the syllabus and the textbooks. For the first part of the course, the recommended textbook is Patterson and Hennessy, Computer Organization and Design 2nd ed, 1-55860-491-X (a 3rd edition was published in Aug 2004 but this was too late to adopt it this year).

Timetable

Stajano: Computer systems
Thu 2004-10-07 12:00 LT2
Mon 2004-10-11 15:00 LT1
Tue 2004-10-12 12:00 LT2
Wed 2004-10-13 16:00 LT1
Thu 2004-10-14 12:00 LT2
Mon 2004-10-18 15:00 LT1
Tue 2004-10-19 12:00 LT2
Wed 2004-10-20 16:00 LT1

Wilkinson: Network systems
Tue 2004-11-02 12:00 LT2
Thu 2004-11-04 12:00 LT2
Tue 2004-11-09 12:00 LT2
Thu 2004-11-11 12:00 LT2
Tue 2004-11-16 12:00 LT2
Thu 2004-11-18 12:00 LT2
Tue 2004-11-23 12:00 LT2
Thu 2004-11-25 12:00 LT2

Goodies

Lecture 2: Instruction set architectures

Get the free SPIM simulator mentioned in your textbook and write some programs for it. To get you started with boilerplate stuff, here is a very simple program that prints the numbers from 1 to 10.

Suggestions for fun things you might do

The very first program that Maurice Wilkes and his team ran on the EDSAC in 1949 computed a table of squares. A few days later, a program to print a table of prime numbers had also run. Do that yourself.

It is also worth modifying the 1-to-10 program to make use of a subroutine and then trace its execution, looking carefully at the stack and at registers $29 and $31, to explore the issues mentioned on pages 18 and 19 of your handout. If you are ambitious, you could also pass some procedure arguments on the stack.