COMSM0109: Unit Materials
The lecturers for this unit are:
| Instructors | Office |
| David May | MVB 2.10 |
| Simon McIntosh-Smith | MVB 2.09.5 |
Lecture times for 2011-12: Thursdays 14:00-16:00 in room MVB 1.11 LR.
The timetables and room allocations for this unit are here:
Support
It is important to effectively utilise the various forms of support available for this unit; see the page about communication in the department for a general introduction.Labs and Help Desk: There are no timetabled lab sessions for this unit; this is a departmental policy in relation to study within the second and later years. The lack of lab sessions means it is even more important to utilise the other forms of support available, for example the help desk in MVB room 3.19 should be the first point of contact.
Forum: The forum can provide a useful way for you to help each other and to get questions answered by the lecturers or lab supervisors, both of whom will take part in online discussions:
Feel free to post questions and so on; we'll try to answer them as soon as possible. However, before you use the forum you should make sure you have first tried to help yourself by reading lecture slides and course texts for example. Note that forum posts from previous years might be useful for reference:- COMSM0109 Forum 2010-1
- COMSM0109 Forum 2009-0
- COMSM0109 Forum 2008-9
- COMSM0109 Forum 2007-8
- COMSM0109 Forum 2006-7
- COMSM0109 Forum 2005-6
- COMSM0109 Forum 2004-5
Email: Email is very useful for the lecturers to contact all of you, but it isn't so useful for you to contact the lecturers. They often get completely swamped with emails, so use of the forum is prefered for any questions. Following this policy for all but vital (or personal) problems will hopefully ensure common questions and answers are quickly made available to everyone.
Feedback: Unlike some other units, coursework assignments in this unit are not automatically marked. This means the feedback will be slower, but of a fairly high quality. In particular we aim to provide a model answer as well as individual feedback. If you need additional feedback, please seek this via the routes above.
Lecture Notes
These will appear after each lecture.
Coursework Assignments
Some coursework descriptions might appear online before the advertised start date as a courtesy to you; previous years have found it useful to be able to plan their workload and generally read and think about the problems before starting. However don't take a description as being finalised until the start date: up until this date minor details might change.
Coursework dates for 2011-12
| Number | Week | Start Date | Real Deadline | Late Deadline | Description | Submit |
| 1 | 1-5 | Oct 13th | Friday Nov 11th | Saturday Nov 12th | Simple Scalar Processor | submit Simple Scalar Processor |
| 2 | 6-10 | Nov 14th | Friday Dec 16th | Saturday Dec 17th | Superscalar Processor | submit Superscalar Processor Marking Slot Sign-up (to appear) |
New late submission of coursework policy (updated Oct 2009)
From Ian Holyer:There is a new scheme in place for late submission of coursework this year, to bring the department in line with the University's new rules for uniform treatment of the issue.
After the deadline for an assignment, you can submit up to a day late, and the penalty will be to subtract 10% from your mark. You can also submit after that, up to a week late, with the added penalty that your mark will be capped at the pass mark (40% for most units, 50% for M level units).
A new faculty system is being developed to automate this, but in the meantime, we will continue to use the departmental submission and progress system. The department system records the deadline, plus a late deadline one day later. If you submit anything at all during the one-day extension, a red L flag will appear on the progress page. The system does NOT currently display the 10% penalty, but the intention is that it will be applied in due course. The system currently does not allow any online submission after one day late. To take advantage of the pass-mark-only one-week extension, you will have to email your work to the lecturer concerned.
If there is a weekend just before the deadline, you use it AT YOUR OWN RISK. For example, if the deadline is Sunday and you can't submit until Monday because the network is down, you will normally have to accept the 10% penalty. The same goes for one or two day minor illnesses - you are expected to allow for that. Individual exceptions to the deadlines will only be granted for (a) serious illness with a medical certificate, or similar problem, or (b) an agreed recovery plan for students who have slipped into a position where they risk failing everything, for whatever reason.
For those of you who were here last year, please note the differences. In particular there is no longer any explicit free extension - the old 3-day extension has become the new one-day 10% penalty extension.
As and when we make progress on moving over to the new faculty system, Ian Holyer will let you know.
Recommended Texts
D Sima, T Fountain and P Kacsuk. Advanced Computer Architectures: a Design Space Approach. Addison Wesley Longman. 1997. ISBN: 0201422913 Price: £41.99. Essential (Amazon)John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson. Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (5th edition). Morgan Kaufmann. 2011. ISBN: 978-0-12-383872-8. Price: £52. Useful, if a bit focused on RISC (at least in the past). (Amazon)
Links and Resources
The definitive source of online material is: There is a great on-line collection of the "best ever" computer architecture papers. These were all recipients of the ACM SIGARCH "influential paper awards" - definitely worth a read.There are a number of example exam archives online from similar units at other universities. Although these are not perfectly aligned to the COMSM0109 unit (i.e. there is some material which we didn't cover and they lack some things we did), there are some good questions to practise on: