Parallel Computer Organization and Design

Teaching fundamental design concepts and the challenges of emerging technology, this textbook prepares students for a career designing the computer systems of the future. Self-contained yet concise, the material can be taught in a single semester, making it perfect for use in senior undergraduate and graduate computer architecture courses. This edition has a more streamlined structure, with the reliability and other technology background sections now included in the appendix. New material includes a chapter on GPUs, providing a comprehensive overview of their microarchitectures; sections focusing on new memory technologies and memory interfaces, which are key to unlocking the potential of parallel computing systems; deeper coverage of memory hierarchies including DRAM architectures, compression in memory hierarchies and an up-to-date coverage of prefetching. Practical examples demonstrate concrete applications of definitions, while the simple models and codes used throughout ensure the material is accessible to a broad range of computer engineering/science students.

• In-depth coverage of key design issues: complexity, power and reliability, as well as performance
• Covers core microarchitecture, chip multiprocessors and large-scale multiprocessor systems
• New to this edition is a detailed look at graphic processing units, one of the most popular parallel architectures today
• Also includes a comprehensive overview of memory systems, an Achilles heel for parallel computers