Dear Colleague:

Welcome to Berkeley CS252! My name is Joe Gebis. In this Spring 2007 semester I will be the NTU course consultant for Professor David Patterson.s Graduate Computer Architecture course. The videos for this course were recorded in the Spring semester of 2006 and include the latest material.

I am a Ph.D. student in the EECS department at Berkeley. My research focus is on high-performance, low-power novel computer architectures. A description of some of my research background can be found here:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~gebis/Research/

I took CS252 with Prof. Patterson, and was subsequently a TA for the class in a later semester that he taught it.

CS252 is a popular class at Berkeley. The course focuses on the techniques of quantitative analysis and evaluation of modern computing systems, such as the selection of appropriate benchmarks to reveal and compare the performance of alternative design choices in system design. The emphasis is on the major component subsystems of high-performance computers: pipelining, instruction-level parallelism, memory hierarchies, input/output systems, and on-chip parallelism.

Throughout this semester I will be working with you to make this class a successful learning experience. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. My office hours and other critical information are detailed in the course information packet distributed with this letter. If you wish to reach me outside my regular office hours, call the Cal VIEW office at (510) 642-5766 and they will contact me. I will return your call promptly. Of course, you can email me at any time.

NTU students enrolled in this class are required to have email access. This is by far the most efficient means of communication for our distance learning courses. Please read your email regularly. I will make announcements or distribute answers to questions that will be of interest to all.

The class website, which contains the latest class information, is here:
http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~n252/sp07/

I wish you a successful and fulfilling semester and look forward to working with you.