Computer Architecture – ETH Zürich – Fall 2017 | Hacker News Reader

Computer Architecture – ETH Zürich – Fall 2017

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201 pointsmatt_d30 comments

I took the course this year. Prof Mutlu is a fantastic teacher, I learned a lot but the course was a lot of effort, especially the labs. Nevertheless, best course I took at ETH so far.

Course material: https://safari.ethz.ch/farm/architecture_fs17/doku.php?id=st...

I would like to point your attention to:

"From NAND to Tetris. Building a Modern Computer From First Principles"

http://www.nand2tetris.org/

Ah, ETH. Still among the top ten elite computer science universities in the world. Nice to see it's getting some exposure on "Hacker News".

I'm a technical architect by trade and profession, this is how I earn my living. Students have apprenticed under me over the years. This is not how I would approach teaching computer architecture. He's teaching basic principles. In my view, architecting systems and software is an advanced topic, in the 600-700 difficulty range. The material he's teaching is in the 100 range. It's very theoretical, and I firmly believe that teaching architecture needs to be a very practical, hands-on experience, and that the prerequisite is about 20 years of professional system engineering experience first: technical implementation experience, systems experience, integration and testing experience in the area of small and large scale systems. System, network, and database development and administration. Digital logic circuit design. Requirements gathering, documentation. Those would be the prerequisites for teaching someone to become an architect in the context of computer science.

What he's teaching is introduction to computing. The course is a misnomer. Computer architecture is about designing systems, not operation of the system.

I think this course is about Computer Architecture as in Computer Organization, ie a course about the layer between digital circuits and operating systems. You probably confuse the term with Software Architecture.

I have watched many of these and I have to say Onur Mutlu is excellent. I have watched his lectures from CMU as well ETH. It must be fantastic attend these in person.

I am curious does anyone more about him and his background?

His PhD thesis was Runahead execution IIRC.

https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/pub/mutlu_hpca03.pdf

A lot of my friends took his class at CMU. They said it was hard but they learnt a lot :)

He was recently a visiting researcher in my sister team at Google. Even though I didn't take his class, he was very approachable and was glad to meet another CMU person. It was a big loss to CMU when he left IMO.

So stoked this is on HN's front page. Mutlu's materials* were very helpful when I was getting started with computer architecture. Highly recommend this!

*I think he was at CMU back then though.

I think the pass rate for such course is very low, 50%-ish. I once took a similar course but was about mechanical architecture. Pass rate was 50-60-ish. I spent whole summer studying it and only got 4.75... But indeed, I learned a lot.

For clarification for non-Swiss people: Grades in Switzerland go 1-6, with 6 being the best, 4 being passing and 1 being the worst grade. A 4.75, typically rounded to a 5, is therefore a decent, though not amazing grade.

For ETH it's getting close to amazing, as you'll pretty much never reach a 6.

Depends. At least for EE there's a big difference between the courses that are supposed to filter the students (usually years 1 and 2) and those that don't. For the latter a high grade like 5.75 or even 6 was doable, for the former the time limit and amount of material to study is so harsh that I wouldn't even know where to start to achieve that.

The undergraduate courses in Theoretical physics at the ETH are done with books (e.g. Goldstein: Classical Mechanics, Jackson: Eletrodynamics...) which are PhD Level in the US.

Physics study at ETH is notoriously hard, but that’s not what you get at CS AFAIK.

That's why ETH is among the top ten universities in the world.

I think that is true for most German speaking universities. I know for a fact that both Unis in Munich and Heidelberg basically teach PhD level courses in Undergrad in the sense that there is no Graduate Electrodynamics and Undergraduate Electrodynsmics just one experimental and one theoretical course in which Jackson is typically one of the references, the same is true for QM etc

Could you enlighten me on something? Do you know why the grading scale has more failing grades than passing?

Nice to see some ETH material here!

Are these slides recorded from the wall or why do they have that "special" look? Feels like some lecture notes from the early 2000.

There are 382 papers if you include the "suggested" in the readings section of this course. Genuinely curious how many students actually read.

Reviewing some of the papers was required as part of the homework assignments. That included about 15 of the most important papers. Additionally I read about 20 more to understand some of the ideas a bit better, but the list is very exhaustive and serves more as a pointer to supplemental material for those interested.

Thank you! I wasn't being snarky if that wasn't clear, I assumed it was something along those lines. I was excited to see/have access to a curated list of work on architecture that exhaustive, having never studied it in university.

It seems lecture 27 is not available. Can anybody check that out?

Second question, is this graduate level or undergraduate?

P.S. Thank you so much for providing this.

> Second question, is this graduate level or undergraduate?

The course can be taken as part of a master's degree[1].

[1] http://www.vvz.ethz.ch/Vorlesungsverzeichnis/lerneinheit.vie...

Thank you so much, this is what I looking for ;)

Notably, this is a more advanced view compared to the obligatory course taught during the Bachelor's degree called Systems Programming and Computer Architecture (http://www.vvz.ethz.ch/Vorlesungsverzeichnis/lerneinheit.vie...).

As far as I can recall lecture 27 was mostly exam logistics, course feedback and private discussions about what courses to take and what kind of projects are available within the group. So really no point in having it public..

Thank you so much, so right now I feel relieved I am not missing anything.

Is 2.5 hours per lecture a norm there?

No, that's quite a long one. Usually the slots are 45min plus 10-15min break, and lectures often take 2 adjacent slots. But these are 3 slot lectures.

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