LECTURE: Computational Building Blocks: Hardware

Overview

Teaching: 30 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What happens in a computer’s hardware when it runs your software?

• What is a processor / core / CPU?

• What is an accelerator?

• How do processor, accelerator, memory, interconnect, disk, etc. make a parallel computer fast or slow?

Objectives

• Understand the underlying model of conventional general-purpose computing including the roles of processor, memory (incl. cache), and disk

• Understand the physical basis of multi-core processors and the distinction between processor, core, and CPU

• Understand parallelism in the form of vectorisation and simultaneous multithreading (SMT)

• Understand how accelerators differ from general-purpose processors

• Appreciate how the balance in performance metrics of individual hardware components can impact overall performance

Slides

This part of the course will be delivered using a slide presentation. You can find the slides for this here.

Key Points

• To be determined