50.002 Computation Structures

Hello World!

Full stack development starts here.

50.002 introduces the architecture of digital systems, emphasising structural principles common to a wide range of technologies. In specific, the course develops:

A hierarchical set of building blocks that make up a digital system (logic gates, combinational and sequential circuits, finite state machines, processors, and complete systems)
Understanding of the operation of a moderately complex digital system; a simple RISC-based computer we called the \(\beta\) using the building blocks above, and ability to specify, implement and debug its components.
Exploration of both hardware and software mechanisms through a series of design examples (labs and 1D/2DC projects)

According to the IEEE/ACM Computer Curriculum 2008, prepared by the Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Computer Society and ACM (Association for Computing Machinery):

The computer lies at the heart of computing. Without it most of the computing disciplines today would be a branch of theoretical mathematics. To be a professional in any field of computing today, one should not regard the computer as just a black box that executes programs by magic. All students of computing should acquire some understanding and appreciation of a computer system’s functional components, their characteristics, their performance, and their interactions.There are practical implications as well. Students need to understand computer architecture in order to structure a program so that it runs more efficiently on a real machine. In selecting a system to use, they should be able to understand the tradeoff among various components, such as CPU clock speed vs. memory size.

The term architecture is taken to include instruction set architecture (the programmer’s abstraction of a computer), organization or microarchitecture (the internal implementation of a computer at the register and functional unit level), and system architecture (the organization of the computer at the cache and bus level). Students should also understand the complex trade-offs between CPU clock speed, cache size, bus organization, number of core proces- sors, and so on. Computer architecture also underpins other areas of the computing curriculum such as operating systems (input/ output, memory technology) and high-level languages (pointers, parameter passing).

By the end of this course, you’re expected to:

Be familiar with flaws and limitations in simple systems using the static discipline, clocked registers and async inputs.
Implement a simple RISC-based CPU architecture
Apply architectural support and tackle instruction set design issues for contemporary software structures.
Analyse of potential concurrency, precedence constraints, and performance measures.

All lesson materials: lecture notes, problem sets, and FPGA tutorials can be found in this site. Please refer to the 50.002 course handout (link in edimension) to obtain the links to our lab handouts.

We have also recorded lecture videos and post-lecture videos for each topic. The links to the individual videos can be found in the respective lecture notes.

Computer Architecture is indeed an underrated topic of study for web developers and programmers. Understanding the low level concepts of the system on which you are implementing binary trees and hash tables and making web applications, and how they actually run on your PC is just as important as actually implementing them.

That being said, is often really difficult to visualise why we learn certain topics in 50.002. Each weekly topic is a building block to understand how digital systems work (a.k.a your computers). By itself, it is not obvious why it is an integral part to learn in your journey as a computer scientist. It’s like the parable of a blind men and an elephant.

The parable of the blind men and an elephant is a story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and imagine what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions, they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans have a tendency to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people’s limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.

We ask you to be patient and bear with us as you go through this Term. Lots of frustration, confusion, and even exasperation is common but not unmanaged. Talk to your TAs and Instructors for guidance at any moment in time, and try to avoid snowballing of work as much as possible.

Job Prospects

Before you read this section, see our roadmap first.

From that you can obtain the bird’s eyeview of 50.002. Then let’s briefly go through possible job prospects that you can have should you equip yourselves with the knowledge of how computers work.

Yes, there are more Computer Science related jobs out there than web developers.

System Security Engineer

If you’re planning to take 50.044 in the future and work in system security related field, pay great attention to 50.002. As a system security expert, you’re expected to protect the security of users, individual computer systems, including personal computers, smart cards and embedded platforms. You need to know how digital systems are made and work down to the hardware level before even beginning to protect it.

Hardware and Embedded System Engineer, CPU and Platform Architect

Every year, major tech companies always release their new, cutting edge technologies, be it new CPU architecture, better and faster motherboard, etc. Terms like unified memory, z-nm transistors, basic CPU specs like L-cache, overclocking, TDP rating, clock speed should sound really familiar to you. Would you like to be the ones who contribute in their development?

System on Chip Engineer

System on Chip (SOC) is the integration of functions necessary to implement an electronic system onto a single substrate and contains at least one processor. It is a popular field as of today (2023) due to its unprecendented efficiency. Have you ever wondered why?

Cybersecurity Expert

Any career in cybersecurity requires a deep technical knowledge on how digital systems (that you’re protecting) work. Obviously, you can’t professionally protect a house without knowing its schematic, materials, weak points, etc.

Operating System Engineer

Building the next-generation Operating System? Surely you need to be familiar with the architecture of the CPU you’re building it for.

Tech Lead, DevOps Engineer

Any good fullstack software engineer needs to have a pretty good idea about the Operating System, Network, and Security. In order to appreciate the knowledge in these domains, it is fundamental to understand basic principles of how our computers work, all the way down to its ISA. You’ll never know when you’ll be faced with some very weird bugs that requires systematic debugging, or needing to fix major vulnerability in your system.

Contributing to Open Source Project

Thinking of contributing to improve the Linux Kernel? Or writing the next-generation debugger? Contributing by making merge requests to fix open issues in famous backend/frontend framework? How about making an efficient front-end framework by yourself? Maybe you’ll also want to create your own game engine, or simply answer questions in StackOverflow. Yep, think big.

Other Fields and Application

Other non-directly related fields that require you to work with hardware and software optimisation, deep diving into assembly code or making a tweak or two to your compiler requires the basic building blocks taught in 50.002. Knowing how digital systems work really equip you with all of the necessary knowledge to troubleshoot and debug almost anything.