CSC231 Schedule 2010

Back to Main Page | Class Wiki

---

Weekly Schedule

Week	Topics	Reading
Week 1 9/08	Wed 9/8 Introduction Syllabus The PC What's inside? The main players First program in assembly structure presentation documentation Fri 9/10 Skeleton program "Hello world!" in assembly: program Introduction to wikimedia Wikipedia Cheat-Sheet Formatting text Inserting images Creating links Hello world! for the Mac PC Demolition Lab <--- report due next Friday, 9/17/10	Chapter 1 in the Art of Assembly. Also Chapter 3, Sections 0 to 3.1.2. Sections 1.3.1, 1.3.2, 1.3.3, 1.3.4, and 1.3.5 in Carter's PC Assembly Language.
Week 2 9/13	Monday 9/13 Mini Lab Assembling with the -l option to generate a listing nasm -f elf -F stabs -l helloworld.S helloworld.asm The memory contains numbers only Boolean Algebra Binary system logic expressions Wednesday 9/15 Digital Electronics Lab in FH143 Friday 9/17 Digital Electronics Lab in FH143 Mini Lab #1 Lab #2 (Wednesday) Lab #3 (Friday) Homework #1 and Solution Programs
Week 3 9/20	Monday 9/20 Three-bit adder. Review A word on Verilog and FPGAs Examples Architecture of the Pentium (simplified) Wednesday 9/22 Reverse engineering a listing, and solution. ASCII Table Friday 9/24 Comments on lab reports Once again: Everything in memory is a number! Review the reverse engineering example Exercises on Binary/Hexadecimal (do on your own!) The mov instruction (covered here). Introduction to the 32-bit registers: EAX, EBX, ECX, EDX Introduction to the 16-bit registers: AX, BX, CX, DX Introduction to the 8-bit registers: AL, AH, BL, BH, CL, CH, DL, DH Homework #2 and solution	Basic Computer Organization, Sections 3.0, 3.1, 3.3.1 Review Data Representation Bits, Nibbles, Bytes The Hexadecimal System The MOV instruction
Week 4 9/27	Monday 9/27 The MOV Instruction Exercises with the MOV instruction Wednesday 9/29 MOUNTAIN DAY! Friday 10/1 Arithmetic instructions: ADD, SUB, INC, DEC Logic instructions: AND, OR, NOT, XOR using DDD to debug programs Lab 4, Part 1 Lab 4: Using the debugger Homework #3 and Solution
Week 5 10/04	Monday 10/4 Exercises with arithmetic instructions Lab 4, Part 2 Wednesday 10/6 Representing negative numbers, Signed Magnitude, 1's complement, 2's complement. Exercises Friday 10/8 A Table of powers of 2: this will be useful for the exercises of the day... C++ program looping forever... Python program looping forever... Problem of the day... Lab 4: Using the debugger Homework #4 and Solution	Signed and unsigned numbers are covered in Sections 1.7 and 1.8 and Chap. 2 Boolean Algebra
Week 6 10/11	Monday Fall Break Wednesday 10/13 Review 2's complement An example illlustrating what compiler code looks like. Logic Design: Building a "subtractor" with an adder, using only AND, OR, NOT and XOR gates. Mul/Div Exercise: Teller Machine Friday 10/15 Addressing Modes Question of the day: What is an instruction set? Is there a best way to define an instruction set? Pentium Instruction Set Cool videos for a rainy afternoon Introduction to Python by Guido van Rossun, from Google Videos. The first 15 minutes are fine. You can skip the rest! Intro to Python (The first 5 minutes are good). More videos of Guido van Rossun, the creator of Python. The main addressing modes: inherent register immediate direct indirect/based/indexed indirect with displacement base-indexed base-indexed with displacement Exercises on Addressing Modes Ascii Table No homework assignment this week. Prepare for midterm!	The signed and unsigned representations of numbers are covered in Sections 1.7 and 1.8 of The Art of Assembly, and in Chapter 2 of Carter's PC Assembly Language. Addressing modes are covered in Chapter 4 of The Art of Assembly. We won't cover "Displacement Only Addressing" modes (Section 4.6.2.1). Mentally replace 16-bit registers by 32-bit registers when reading this section.
Week 7 10/18	Monday 10/18 In class Midterm Exam Sample Questions to get ready... Wednesday 10/20 The Loop instruction Exercises on loops Review of addressing modes Return to the exercises on addressing modes, but now use loops Friday 10/22 Lab 5 Loops and Addressing Modes Homework #5 and Solution Programs Lab 5	The Loop instruction The Push and Pop instructions
Week 8 10/25	Monday 10/25 The shift instructions: SHR, SHL, logical and arithmetic variants. Sound waves, a bit of physics The format of wav sound files A demo program: readWaveFile.asm Wednesday 10/27 Using a Makefile for Lab 5 Challenge of the day: clip 8-bit samples by forcing overflow to 0xff... Examples with wav files: Lab 6 Friday 10/29 Continue with Lab 6 Lab 6 Homework 6 and Solution Program	The Wav File Format The shifts instructions are covered in Chapter 6 of the Art of Assembly reference.
Week 9 11/01	Monday 11/01 Functions Using the stack Passing parameters by value by reference functions returning values Exercises on Functions Wednesday 11/03 Review of functions: passing parameters through registers push/pop organization (example program: maze.asm) examples involving copying buffers Friday 11/05 Passing parameters through the stack Lab 7 Homework 7 and Solution Program Lab 7 and Solution Programs	The Call and Ret Instructions Functions and the topics associated with passing parameters are covered in Carter's Manual on Assembly Language, in Chapter 4, titled Subprograms.
Week 10 11/08	Monday 11/08 We continue with Lab 7 Wednesday 11/10 No No, don't do that! Int-returning function Declaring temporary variables in functions Passing by reference Friday 11/12 Review sumProc1.asm: Pass through registers sumProc2.asm: Pass by value sumProc3.asm: Int returning function sumProc4.asm: Pass by reference sumProc5.asm: Local variables Introduction to Homework 8 Top-Down design (again!) Lab 7 Homework 8 and solution program	the preprocessor directive %define is fully explained here. The PUSHAD instruction
Week 11 11/15	Monday 11/15 Compare instruction and flag bits A Program using compare instruction and showing flag settings Exsercises with conditional jumps Wednesday 11/17 Continuation of Exsercises on conditional jumps Friday 11/19 Functions + tests = Recursion factorial.asm No homework assignment this week!	The Flag Bits Conditional Jumps What instructions modify flags
Week 12 11/22	Monday Continuation of Coverage of Recursion Video: History of Computers Wednesday Thanksgiving Break Friday Thanksgiving Break
Week 13 11/29	Monday 11/29 More on Recursion: Multiplication Recursive Multiplication Algorithm Wednesday 12/1 Searching a 1-dimensional array for the largest/smallest element Sketching binary-search on an array A demo: comparison of interpreted versus compiled languages: The N-Queens test Friday 12/3 Discussion: compiler optimizations Pipelines Homework #9 <-- Due date = 12/8 evening	Compiler optimization on wikipedia. Section 4.8 of Carter's Assembly Manual on recursion. Pentium pipelining A very good description of the Pentium 4 Architecture at www.hardwaresecrets.com Some parameters for virtual memory (taken from www.cp.eng.chula.ac.th): Typical range of parameters for virtual memory block (page) size      512-8192 bytes hit time 1-10 clock cycles miss penalty 100,000-600,000 clocks (access time) (100,000-500,000 clocks) (transfer time) (10,000-100,000 clocks) miss rate 0.00001% - 0.001% main memory size 4 MB - 2048 MB
Week 14 12/06	Monday 12/06 Continue with pipelines Virtual Memory Wednesday 12/08 Cache Memory Average Access Time Back to compiler optimization Pipeline-related Delayed branches Instruction reordering Cache-oriented use of registers instead of memory (register variables) A program to generate random numbers Friday 12/10 2-D arrays Floating Point Numbers Fixed-point format Floating-Point Converter applet. (Optional) Homework #10 <--- due date 12/14	2D Arrays General description of the floating-point notation on Wikipedia. Also, the IEEE 754 Standard nicely presented. A very good description of the limitations of floating-point numbers in Python: Read it! Also, not to be missed: The perils of floating-point Floating Point in Assembly: some high level stuff!
Week 15 12/13	Monday: Last Class

• Help Notes

List of Selected Programs

Assembly

• Assembly Programs

Miscellaneous Information

• List of Pentium Instructions with Op-Codes
• Pentium Instruction Set
• The Wav File Format

• Things to remember when working on homework assignments...

Linux Related

• System Calls