CS251a
Advanced Computer Architecture
Advanced Computer Architecture
Exams will be take-home, and you’ll be given 24 hours to answer a few questions.
You may use any resources available to you, asides from looking at answers to
similar questions or consulting with anyone else about the answers. Questions
are not intended to require very long answers, however, and the entire exam
should be take-able within 3 hours. It could
take much longer and be more stressful, of course, if you need to do re-read
papers to answer the questions. These questions will be primarily short-essay
questions, focusing on concept synthesis and relationships.
I will only test on subjects that are discussed in
class or are in the required readings, though the question may be regarding an aspect which we did not directly discuss.
My intention behind using take-home exams is to encourage deeper reflection on concepts we learned about (rather than focusing on material-cramming) and also to give you practice for making arguments and writing prose.
Links:
The question format is somewhat inspired by the UW architecture qual, and so you could look there for a number of additional examples. There are a number of questions there that are excellent, but some of them are of-course out-of-scope, feel free to ask if it is not clear.
I pulled a few from the above which are questions that I think would be relevant. The ones on our test may be slightly more specific to the material that we have covered (eg. these questions don’t ask about Tomasulu’s algorithm or R10K approach, but I could ask about those).
It goes without saying that that even though this is a take-home exam, you may not consult with others about the questions – it is intended to be an individual test. Please follow the rules so that I can continue to have take-home tests in the future.