Fundamentals of Computer Systems

We discuss how computers operate at fairly low level of abstraction and then discuss how computer systems build as layers and layers of abstraction. After taking this course, you will know the components of a computer and how do they fit together. How computers do arithmetic and how does the code you write actually execute? How does a program in a high level language like C get translated into a form the machine can execute? How can you write code likely to execute efficiently? How is information stored and accessed? How does your program access existing "libraries"? 

• Study the fundamental concepts of computer systems, including logic design, processor architecture, assembly language, and memory systems 

• Understand how application programmers can use the knowledge of the underlying system to write better programs 

By the end of the course, students should be able to:

• Explain why everything is data, including instructions, in computers 

• Explain the reasons for using alternative formats to represent numerical data 

• Describe how negative integers are stored in sign-magnitude and twos complement representations 

• Explain how fixed-length number representations affect accuracy and precision 

• Describe the internal representation of non-numeric data, such as characters, strings, records, and arrays 

• Convert numerical data from one format to another 

• Summarize how instructions are represented at both the machine level and in the context of a symbolic assembler 

• Demonstrate how to map between high-level language patterns into assembly/machine language notations 

• Explain how subroutine calls are handled at the assembly level 

• Show how fundamental high-level programming constructs are implemented at the machine-language level

• Articulate that there are many equivalent representations of computer functionality, including logical expressions and gates, and be able to use mathematical expressions to describe the functions of simple combinational and sequential circuits 

• Explain basic instruction level parallelism using pipelining and the major hazards that may occur 

• Determine, for a given processor and memory system implementation, the average cycles per instruction 

Computer Systems, A Programmer's Perspective by Randal E. Bryant and David O'Hallaron, Prentice Hall, 2016 (Third Edition) 

We would like to express our gratitude towards Randy Bryant's and Dave O' Hallaron's course Introduction to Computer Systems (ICS), offered at CMU School of Computer Science as their amazing educational slides motivated and simplified several complex explanations in this course.