Administrivia

Textbook and Recommended Readings

The text book for this course is Computer Organization & Design: The Hardware / Software Interface by Patterson and Hennessy. The optional reference for this course is MIPS RISC Architecture, by Kane and Heinrich, and the paper SPIM S20: A MIPS R2000 Simulator by J Larus will serve both as a quick reference for the instruction set and as a manual for using the xspim emulator.

Office Hours

My office is in AP&M 5141, and my office hours are Tuesdays and Thursdays 3pm-4pm new!

(this was wrong and did not agree with the handout). You can make appointments for other times. You should feel free to stop by at other times as well, but I may ask you to come back at another time if I'm busy.

The TA for the course is Chuong Le (CL). Chuong's office hours are 5pm-6pm Mondays in AP&M 3337A. There are several tutors for the course who will be available in the uAPE lab during their hours.

Kevin won't be around for the week of Nov 16.

Tutor	Hours
Kevin Berggren (KB)	Mon 1:30pm-2:30pm
Jack Fan (JF)	Fri 11:10pm-12:10pm
Nathan Greenfield (NG)	Mon 12:30pm-1:30pm
Lori Yoshida (LY)	Thu 11am-12pm

When you send email to the tutors, put CSE30 in the subject line.

Mon	Tue	Thu	Fri
		LY 11-12	JF 11:10-12:10
NG 12:15-1:15
KB 1:30-2:30
	bsy 3-4	bsy 3-4
CL 5-6

If you need to meet with me or a tutor at other times, you may make appointments by email.

Grading

This course will have around 6 homework assignments; some of these may be larger projects; they will mostly be done on-line. There will be an in-class midterm and a final.

Grading will be based on the following percentages:

Homework	30%
Midterm	30%
Final	40%

Grade cut-offs will be determined from ``natural'' breaks in the score distribution rather than straight percentage cut-offs or simple curving. If all of you learn the material, I will be happy to give everyone an ``A''; conversely, if none of you learn the material, I will be (less) happy to give everyone an ``F''.

As I said in class, comments will in general count for 40% of a programming assignment's grade. Comments are very important because they are how you communicate with the next programmer who has to pick up your code; if your program is not understandable, it may have to be rewritten from scratch. Real-life products have had portions thrown away and rewritten because of such problems.

bsy+www@cs.ucsd.edu, last updated Mon Nov 30 21:53:12 PST 1998.

email bsy & tutors