CSC 7100 Computer Systems Summer 2007

SYLLABUS


Meetings
Arrange with instructor
Instructor Dr. Thomas Way
160A Mendel Science Center

Email:   thomas.way@villanova.edu
IM:       DrTomWay
Phone:  (610) 519-5033
Office hours (See my web site)
Teaching Assistant Jonathan Bulava <jonathan.bulava@villanova.edu>
Textbook None
Web site
http://www.csc.villanova.edu/~tway and follow the link for CSC 7100
Course
description

Fundamental concepts in computer architecture and operating systems. Information representation, gates and digital logic, ALU and central processing organization, instruction sets, basics of pipelining, processes, memory management and file systems.

In this course you will learn about the fundamental concepts underlying computer hardware and software, and how computer scientists make these two aspects of a computer system work together.  To do this, you will read and explore a variety of the most famous and important ideas in computer science, and will learn to write C programs that run on the Unix operating system.

Lesson plan
The course will combine selected readings from online sources, weekly homework and programming assignments, and a final programming project.  Projects will be written in the C programming language on the Unix operating system.
Topics
Information representation (binary, ascii, etc.)
Digital logic and logic gates
Instruction set architecture and assembly language
Von Neumann Model (CPU, ALU, Memory, Input, Output)
Pipelining
Processes
Concurrency
Memory management
File systems
Grading policy
30%  Homework assignments
50%  Programming projects
20%  Final project
Final grades
91% A, 81% B, 71% C, 60% D, and below 60% F. Plus and minus grades will be used appropriately for borderline cases.

Last updated: 05/29/07