Modernizing the Computer Architecture Curriculum at Carnegie Mellon: A Multi-Core-Systems Centered Approach

The Setting: Computer science and engineering is undergoing a revolution. Computationally very powerful parallel computers, which used to be the luxury of the government and billion-dollar corporations, are already in the laptops and desktops of millions of ordinary users. Computer architects are building existing computer chips with multiple processing cores inside them, as opposed to with solely a single processing core, which used to be the traditional way of designing mainstream computer chips until around 2004. Essentially, a processing core is analogous to the brain of the computing system: the more cores there are, the more tasks the system can perform in parallel. Chips with multiple processing cores are commonly called multi-core chips. Existing Intel and AMD chips in the market already have 4 cores, IBM and Sun Microsystems have chips with respectively 9 and 16 cores, and Intel has demonstrated prototypes of an 80-core chip. Both academic and industrial researchers, including us at Carnegie Mellon, are envisioning and charting out designs of 1000core chips in the 10-20-year timeframe [1, 2]. Soon, unprecedented amounts of computing power will be in the hands of almost every single computer user and programmer. And, both the programmers and the users need to be aware of how to harness this power. To aid understanding, Figure 1 shows an example single-core system and an example multi-core system with nine processing cores. Major differences between the two systems are highlighted in terms of designers’, programmers’ and users’ perspectives.