CIS-2010 (Computer Organization) Home Page

This is the home page for Peter Chapin's Computer Organization course notes for the Spring 2017 semester. Here you will find electronic versions of class handouts, homework assignments, lecture slides, and links to other references of interest. If you are a student taking Computer Organization you should bookmark this page.

The course syllabus gives an overview of the course and its content, lists course resources, and describes the grading policy and related issues.
The homework submission area and gradebook are on Moodle, but all other course resources are here.
We'll be using the Open Watcom C compiler and x86 assembler in this class. You can download a snapshot of the development version from this web site. To install it, just unzip the archive in any suitable location. To use it, open a console window and run the useOW.bat batch file in the root folder of the unpacked archive.
My C Tutorial may be of interest. It includes the "lectures" of a first course in programming using C. It also includs several sample programs of interest.
The Hexdump program displays a file's contents in hex. It is a useful utility and an example of a (relatively simple) C program. I will describe in class the basics of using Git to access this repository.
The Huffman program compresses a file using Huffman encoding. It is a useful utility and an example of (less simple) C program.
My home page contains other resources of potential interest.

Topic Summary

2017-01-17. Class introduction, resources, grading policy, etc. Described how to build simple C and Assembly programs using Open Watcom.
2017-01-19. Described some details of Program Zero (how it works, how to build it). Introduced binary, hex, and two's complement.
2017-01-24. No class due to weather.
2017-01-26. Reviewed two's complement. Discussed bit manipulation instructions: and, or, xor. Discussed the representation of floating point numbers (Section 2.4 in the text).
2017-01-31. Introduced the assembly language instructions: add, sub, cmp, and various jumps. Described how to implement conditional branches and while loops in assembly language. Showed their corresponding C forms.
2017-02-02. Discussed the details of Lab #2 and some topics needed to make sense of it..
2017-02-07. No class.
2017-02-09. Discussed Homework #2 and how to best approach it. Introduced global variables in both C and Assembly.
2017-02-14. Introduced pointers and arrays in both C and Assembly.
2017-02-16. Discussed the details of Lab #3. Demonstrated the Watcom debugger. Continued discussion of pointers and arrays in C.
2017-02-28. Reviewed pointers and arrays. Discussed dynamic allocation using malloc and free. Introduced structures.
2017-03-02. More discussion of stuctures. Introduced the Date example.
2017-03-07. Review of the Date example. Discussed issues related to structure layout and padding. Did an overview of the assembly language version of Date_advance.
2017-03-09. ?
2017-03-14. Discussed the stack and the stack-based calling convention.
2017-03-16. Discussed Lab #5. Showed three version of a swap array function (in C) and then reviewed the assembly language produced by the compiler for each.
2017-03-21. Discussed the Wind library for managing text-mode windows on the console using assembly language. Introduced calling operating system API functions.
2017-03-23. Reviewed the clear_region implementation in the Wind library in preparation for Lab #6.
2017-03-28. Started discussing virtual memory.
2017-03-30. Continued talking about virtual memory (paging to disk).
2017-04-11. Discussed interrupts and task (context) switching in multi-threaded environments.
2017-04-13. Introduced instruction level parallelism (pipelining, branch prediction, out-of-order execution, super scalar architectures). See ILP.asm for a sample of instruction level parallelism at work.
2017-04-18. Introduced the memory hierarchy and the basic concepts of memory caching.
2017-04-20. Demonstrated caching effects using a Gaussian elimination program in C and Fortran.
2017-04-25. Demonstrated splint by applying it to the str example in the Spica library.
2017-04-27. ...
2017-05-02. Reviewed course topics.
2017-05-04. No class.
— Topics below are subject to change —

Homework

Homework #01. Number Systems. Due: 2017-01-27.
Homework #02. Count Bits. Due: 2017-02-16.
Homework #03. Reverse Array (Assembly). Due: 2017-03-17.
— Homeworks below are subject to change —

Labs

The lab set is summarized in the lab summary document, along with links to specific lab handouts and supporting code samples.

Samples

The "Hello, World" program in C and in assembly language.
Program0 is a complete sample of a mixed C/Assembly program that we will use as a starting point for many of the programs we'll write in this class.
A abstract data type (effectively a "class") that represents calendar dates: Date.h, Date.c, Date_demo.c. There is also an assembly language version: Date.asm.

Resources/Articles

A summary of a few Windows console commands.
A quick reference card for the IA-32 instruction set.
Here is another IA-32 Instruction List that seems nicely done.
The Intel documentation on the Intel64 and IA-32 processors is the ultimate reference for these machines. It is quite heavy.
The Windows API documentation from Microsoft describes all the functions made available to applications by the Windows operating system.