Computer Systems

28h 15m 48s
English
Paid
September 21, 2024

As software engineers, we study computer systems (or computer architecture) to understand how our programs ultimately work and how the machine expects our data to be encoded. The immediate benefit is the ability to write faster, more efficient, and secure code.

In the long term, understanding computer systems provides even more benefits. Every abstraction between us and the hardware introduces leaks. This course will provide the foundational principles for creating robust mental models and more effective analysis.

We will start with how the machine encodes data, including binary representations such as text. Then we will move on to programming in C and assembly to better understand the interface provided by the computer for executing programs. Finally, we will look at two important aspects for improving program performance: using the processor microarchitecture and CPU caches (memory hierarchy).

The course will primarily consist of a sequence of tasks for each topic. You should aim to solve each task, using provided solutions and additional explanations as needed. There will also be several workshops to help connect the topics.

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# Title Duration
1 001 Protobuf varint 57:40
2 002 CSS color convert 36:18
3 003 Beep beep boop 28:15
4 004 Image rotate 57:51
5 005 TCP SYN flood 52:53
6 006 UTF-8 truncate 25:31
7 007 Sneaky NaN 26:34
8 008 Unsigned integers alternatives and overflow (sorry maam) 01:05:34
9 009 Signed integers integers in JavaScript and ones complement Internet checksum 01:15:41
10 010 Floating point IEEE754 structure and safe integers in floats in JavaScript 01:10:39
11 011 Unicode UTF-8 UTF-32 and ugh UTF-16 01:34:22
12 012 What are standard in and standard out 02:44
13 013 Why does a byte have values 0255 04:13
14 014 What do bigendian and littleendian mean 08:08
15 015 Why masking low order bits is like modulus of a power of 2 35:42
16 016 Why do we care about teletype machines 01:29
17 017 Why are some bitwise operations faster than arithmetic equivalents 07:44
18 018 What are file descriptors 0 1 and 2 03:40
19 019 What does it mean for a value to be a certain number of bits 09:20
20 020 What are signed and unsigned integers 10:34
21 021 Why do I sometimes see the sequence rn for a newline 04:05
22 022 What does it mean to flush a buffer 02:17
23 023 Whats the basic difference between UTF8 UTF16 and UTF32 09:25
24 024 Why does one byte correspond to two hexadecimal digits 02:34
25 025 Whats the difference between Unicode and something like UTF8 01:54
26 026 How to remember all the powers of two 03:49
27 027 How do I read a hexdump 06:02
28 028 What is a byte exactly 02:21
29 029 How does UTF-8 encode characters (aka artisinal Unicode sandwich) 10:03
30 030 What is a file descriptor 01:58
31 031 What exactly is hexadecimal 06:13
32 032 What do bitwise and or xor and not do 08:05
33 033 Whats the point of floating point 12:31
34 034 What is the effect of shifting bits 03:57
35 035 How are IEEE 754 floating point numbers encoded (aka why is 01 02 030000000000000004) 20:06
36 036 Hello World 14:36
37 037 Bitcount 23:41
38 038 Fast pangram 34:11
39 039 Dynamic array 43:15
40 040 Varint C extension 50:32
41 041 Basic hashmap 01:21:48
42 042 How do C compilers differ 05:14
43 043 What is a register 06:41
44 044 The generic pointer (void) in C 16:22
45 045 Helping Max rotate bits right 21:05
46 046 Loop syntax in C 05:55
47 047 The C pre-processor macros and conditional inclusion 06:13
48 048 A brief overview of structs in C 15:43
49 049 A brief introduction to Valgrind 16:24
50 050 Type definitions and literals in C 12:07
51 051 A brief overview of malloc and related functions 05:26
52 052 A brief tour of LLDB 33:27
53 053 What happens in the compilation pipeline 10:12
54 054 What is the effect of the compiler optimization level flag 03:43
55 055 Overview of pointers and arrays in C 14:45
56 056 Helping Jessica understand void 39:35
57 057 Assembly Hello world 31:54
58 058 Sum to N 46:27
59 059 Matrix access 15:47
60 060 x8664 pangram 17:09
61 061 Binary convert 09:48
62 062 Cone volume 11:13
63 063 Low level recursion 26:14
64 064 The System V AMD64 calling convention 08:41
65 065 Explaining the terms computer architecture instruction set and microarchitecture 04:27
66 066 Whats the difference between Intel and ATT assembly syntax 08:38
67 067 What are the general purpose registers in x8664 11:37
68 068 What is the fetchdecodeexecute cycle 13:06
69 069 Faster sum 23:21
70 070 Color quantizing 40:57
71 071 Moving beyond the simple fetchdecodeexecute model 32:35
72 072 Grayscale speedup 10:35
73 073 Pointer chase 29:05
74 074 Bogosum 01:00:15
75 075 What is a cache line (brief explanation) 02:16
76 076 Understanding CPU caches 33:24
77 077 Why are there multiple levels of CPU cache 13:47
78 078 Measuring cache performance with perf and cachegrind 13:25

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