ECE940: Advanced Computer Architecture

Lecture #1

Why do we need high speed computers?

Numerical Modeling and simulating physical systems High performance graphics visualization and animations Data Mining Image and video database search

Numerical Modeling and simulating physical systems

Numerical modeling is versatile Parameters can be varied which is not possible in hardware Simulation is interactive and can be visualized graphically Flexible and cheaper

Interaction between theory, experiments and computer simulation

Example: Model of supersonic aircraft

Example: Numerical weather model of earth

Visualization and Animation

High resolution terminals are required If G = Area element, R = pixels in each G and T = time to process a pixel For animation it requires computation to repeat by 60 times/sec. Time to process a pixel = 1/60GR If N = instructions to process a pixel Computational capacity = G x R x P x N

Data Mining
Large databases of the order of 10^12 bytes Complexity = S x P x N where S = size of the database P = No. of instructions N = No. of rules

How to increase speed?

Pipelining Parallel processing Temporal and data parallel processing