Topics List for Qualifying Examination: Architecture

Uniprocessor Topics

1. Operating System and device support: mechanics of OS calls, interrupts, context swap
2. Exploiting Instruction-Level Parallelism: Single and multiple pipelines, hazards, dependencies, optimization, scoreboarding, register renaming
3. Virtual Memory: Single and multiple level, inverted and hashed page tables, protection, translation lookaside buffers
4. Cache: translations, associativity, write-through/write-back, replacement algorithms
5. IO: Polling, interrupts, DMA, busses

Multiprocessor Topics

1. Interconnection topologies: Busses, hypercubes, stars, crossbars; static and dynamic
2. Cache coherence: snoopy (especially MESI family) and directory-based protocols
3. Synchronization: barriers, locks, syncronization instructions
4. Consistency Models
5. Data Integrity (especially error correcting codes)

NOTE: students will be expected to be familiar with representative examples of these concepts.