C++ links: computer architecture

March 1, 2026 · View on GitHub

Books
Communities
Competitions
Conferences
Courses
Emulation & Simulation
Journals & Publications

Books

The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
- Build a Modern Computer from First Principles: From NAND to Tetris
- Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken
- 2nd Edition; 2021
- http://www.nand2tetris.org/
- (no prerequisites)
Introduction to Computing Systems: From Bits & Gates to C/C++ & Beyond
- Yale Patt and Sanjay Patel
- (3rd Edition; 2020)
- https://www.mheducation.com/highered/product/introduction-computing-systems-bits-gates-c-c-beyond-patt-patel/M9781260150537.html
- (no prerequisites, freshmen year level)
Digital Design and Computer Architecture
- ARM Edition (1st Edition; 2015): https://www.elsevier.com/books/digital-design-and-computer-architecture/harris/978-0-12-800056-4
- RISC-V Edition (1st Edition; 2021): https://www.elsevier.com/books/digital-design-and-computer-architecture-risc-v-edition/harris/978-0-12-820064-3
- (background; no prerequisites beyond basic programming) digital logic, hardware
Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective (CS:APP)
- http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/
- (undergraduate level, basic programming background helpful)
Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware-Software Interface
- David A. Patterson, John L. Hennessy
- RISC-V Edition (2nd Edition; 2020) - https://www.elsevier.com/books/computer-organization-and-design-risc-v-edition/patterson/978-0-12-820331-6
- (undergraduate level)
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach
- John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson
- 6th Edition; 2017 - https://www.elsevier.com/books/computer-architecture/hennessy/978-0-12-811905-1
- (graduate level)
Modern Processor Design: Fundamentals of Superscalar Processors
- J.P. Shen and M.H. Lipasti
- 2005
- https://www.waveland.com/browse.php?t=624
Readings in Computer Architecture
- 1999
- Mark D. Hill, Norman P. Jouppi, Gurindar S. Sohi
- http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/readings/www/
- (a collection of seminal papers in computer architecture)
ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS) 25th Anniversary Volume 2014
- https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2591635&picked=prox
Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture
- https://dblp.org/db/series/synthesis-cac
- https://www.springer.com/series/16916

Communities

Computer Architecture Community - https://comp-arch-community.slack.com/ (invitation)
Computer Architecture Student Association
- https://www.comparchsa.org/
Computer Science Research and Practice: #architecture
- Slack Workspace: https://cs-research-practice.slack.com
- Invitation: https://bit.ly/join-cs-slack

Competitions

The 1st JILP Championship Branch Prediction Competition (CBP-1)
- http://www.jilp.org/cbp/
The 1st JILP Data Prefetching Championship (DPC-1)
- http://www.jilp.org/dpc/
The 2nd Data Prefetching Championship (DPC-2)
- http://comparch-conf.gatech.edu/dpc2/
The 2nd Cache Replacement Championship (CRC-2)
- http://crc2.ece.tamu.edu/
The 1st Instruction Prefetching Championship (IPC-1)
- https://research.ece.ncsu.edu/ipc/
The Next-Generation Championship in Branch Prediction (CBP-NG) 2026
- https://cbp-ng.bpchamp.com/
- The CBP-NG Simulator
  - https://github.com/AmpereComputing/cbp-ng/

Journal of Instruction-Level Parallelism (JILP) Workshop on Computer Architecture Competitions (JWAC)

1st JILP Workshop on Computer Architecture Competitions (JWAC-1): Cache Replacement Championship (CRC)
- http://www.jilp.org/jwac-1/
2nd JILP Workshop on Computer Architecture Competitions (JWAC-2): Championship Branch Prediction (CBP-2)
- http://www.jilp.org/jwac-2/
3rd JILP Workshop on Computer Architecture Competitions (JWAC-3): Memory Scheduling Championship (MSC)
- https://www.cs.utah.edu/~rajeev/jwac12/
4th JILP Workshop on Computer Architecture Competitions (JWAC-4): Championship Branch Prediction (CBP-4)
- http://www.jilp.org/cbp2014/
5th JILP Workshop on Computer Architecture Competitions (JWAC-5): Championship Branch Prediction (CBP-5)
- http://www.jilp.org/cbp2016/
6th JILP Workshop on Computer Architecture Competitions (JWAC-6): Championship Value Prediction (CVP-1)
- https://www.microarch.org/cvp1/

Conferences

ASPLOS: International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems - https://asplos-conference.org/ - http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/asplos/
Hot Chips: A Symposium on High Performance Chips - http://www.hotchips.org/archives/
HPCA: International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture - http://www.hpca-conf.org/ - http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/hpca/
ICS: International Conference on Supercomputing - http://www.ics-conference.org/ - http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/ics/
ISCA: International Symposium on Computer Architecture - https://iscaconf.org/ - http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/isca/
MICRO: International Symposium on Microarchitecture - http://www.microarch.org/ - http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/micro/
PACT: International Conference on Parallel Architecture and Compilation - http://pactconf.org/ - http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/IEEEpact/
WikiCFP (Calls For Papers) - http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/call?conference=computer%20architecture

Courses

Computer Architecture - Princeton University / Coursera
- https://www.coursera.org/course/comparch
CS/ECE 3810 Computer Organization - University of Utah
- Prof. Rajeev Balasubramonian
- https://www.cs.utah.edu/~rajeev/cs3810/
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm7BxCUdWqZzjZ-jRe73KUfj2GsSS2FPy
CS/EE 6810 Computer Architecture, University of Utah
- Prof. Rajeev Balasubramonian
- http://www.eng.utah.edu/~cs6810/
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8EC1756A7B1764F6
Great Ideas in Computer Architecture (Machine Structures) - UC Berkeley
- http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61c/
- Computer Science 61C, 001 - Spring 2015
  - https://archive.org/details/ucberkeley-webcast-PL-XXv-cvA_iCl2-D-FS5mk0jFF6cYSJs_
High-performance and Embedded Computer Architecture
- TU Berlin, Embedded Systems Architecture; Prof. Juurlink
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPSsA8oxlSBjidJsSPdpjsQ/
High Performance Computer Architecture - Georgia Institute of Technology / Udacity
- https://www.udacity.com/course/high-performance-computer-architecture--ud007
Onur Mutlu's Lecture Videos and Materials - Carnegie Mellon, ETH
- http://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/lecture-videos.html
- (Strongly recommended -- both the videos as well as the carefully selected, highly relevant readings!)
Parallel Computer Architecture and Programming (CMU 15-418/618)
- http://15418.courses.cs.cmu.edu/
MIT 6.004 Computation Structures
- https://6004.mit.edu/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1DcxXg6GkAcp2zk2w7U6qQ
- OCW: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-004-computation-structures-spring-2009/
- edX
  - edX Part 1: Digital Circuits - https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-part-1-digital-mitx-6-004-1x-0
  - edX Part 2: Computer Architecture - https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-2-computer-mitx-6-004-2x
  - edX Part 3: Computer Organization - https://www.edx.org/course/computation-structures-3-computer-mitx-6-004-3x-0
MIT 6.172 Performance Engineering of Software Systems, Fall 2010
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD2AE32F507F10481
- https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-172-performance-engineering-of-software-systems-fall-2010/video-lectures/
The Hardware/Software Interface - University of Washington
- http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse351/
Workshops on Computer Architecture Education
- https://people.engr.ncsu.edu/efg/wcaes.html
- https://projects.ncsu.edu/wcae/

Courses: Memory

Memory Device Technologies and Applications
- Georgia Tech
- Fall 2021; Shimeng Yu
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnQi8W6dRSW5yM5nmfEwA4aqUr5EHZqw4

Emulation & Simulation

Readings

A Look at Computer Architecture Evaluation Methodologies
- Mario Badr and Natalie Enright Jerger
- Workshop on Pioneering Processor Paradigms (WP3) 2018
- http://mariobadr.com/pdfs/2018-02-25-WP3-paper.pdf
- http://mariobadr.com/pdfs/2018-02-25-WP3-presentation.pdf
- Survey on Computer Architecture Evaluation Methodologies
  - https://github.com/mariobadr/survey-wp3
A Survey of Cache Simulators
- ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 2019
- Hadi Brais, Rajshekar Kalayappan, Preeti Ranjan Panda
- https://homepages.iitdh.ac.in/~rajshekar.k/papers/Survey_Of_Cache_Simulators.pdf
- A survey on architectural simulators focused on CPU caches
  - https://github.com/hadibrais/archsim
A Survey of Computer Architecture Simulation Techniques and Tools
- IEEE Access 2019
- Ayaz Akram, Lina Sawalha
- https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8718630

Software

ChampSim
- https://github.com/ChampSim/ChampSim
- The Championship Simulator: Architectural Simulation for Education and Competition
  - 2022
  - Nathan Gober, Gino Chacon, Lei Wang, Paul V. Gratz, Daniel A. Jiménez, Elvira Teran, Seth H. Pugsley, Jinchun Kim
  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14324
gem5 - http://gem5.org/
- Learning gem5: http://learning.gem5.org/
  - Book: https://github.com/powerjg/learning_gem5
  - Tutorial: http://learning.gem5.org/tutorial/
    - Slides (HPCA 2017): http://www.cs.wisc.edu/multifacet/papers/learning_gem5_tutorial.pdf
    - Videos (HPCA 2017): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-J9GXT0E7AIidmX_DW7pooRJzjoaJtix
GPGPU-Sim
- http://www.gpgpu-sim.org/
- https://github.com/gpgpu-sim/gpgpu-sim_distribution
Intel Software Development Emulator (SDE) - https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-software-development-emulator
MacSim: Simulator for Heterogeneous Architecture
- a cycle-level, heterogeneous architecture simulator for x86 and NVIDIA PTX instructions
- http://comparch.gatech.edu/hparch/macsim.html
- https://github.com/gthparch/macsim
MARSSx86
- http://marss86.org/
- https://github.com/avadhpatel/marss
Multi2Sim
- http://www.multi2sim.org/
- https://github.com/Multi2Sim/multi2sim
QEMU: a generic and open source machine & userspace emulator and virtualizer
- https://www.qemu.org/
- https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu
- QEMU internals: A series of posts about QEMU internals
  - https://airbus-seclab.github.io/qemu_blog/
- QEMU, a Fast and Portable Dynamic Translator
  - 2005 USENIX Annual Technical Conference
  - Fabrice Bellard
  - https://www.usenix.org/conference/2005-usenix-annual-technical-conference/qemu-fast-and-portable-dynamic-translator
SimEng (the Simulation Engine): a framework for building modern cycle-accurate processor simulators
- https://github.com/UoB-HPC/SimEng
- https://uob-hpc.github.io/SimEng/
Sniper - http://snipersim.org/
Structural Simulation Toolkit (SST) - http://sst-simulator.org/
- https://github.com/sstsimulator
- Modsim2017 Presentation: http://hpc.pnl.gov/modsim/2017/Presentations/SST_Modsim17.pdf
- SST components overview (2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5gDYy9aqf4
- ISCA 2015 Tutorial: https://www.osti.gov/scitech/servlets/purl/1257684
XIOSim - A detailed microarchitectural x86 simulator
- https://github.com/s-kanev/XIOSim
ZSim
- https://github.com/s5z/zsim
- http://zsim.csail.mit.edu/tutorial/

Journals & Publications

ACM SIGARCH - https://www.sigarch.org/
- Computer Architecture News: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=J89
- Computer Architecture Today: https://www.sigarch.org/blog/
ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization - http://taco.acm.org/
Andy Glew's CompArch wiki - https://sites.google.com/site/paulclaytonplace/andy-glew-s-comparch-wiki
Computer Architecture Journals List - http://pascal.eng.uci.edu/info/jounral_list.htm
IEEE Computer Architecture Letters (CAL) - https://www.computer.org/web/cal
IEEE Micro - https://publications.computer.org/micro/
IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (TCCA) Awards - http://ieeetcca.org/awards/
ISCA: International Symposium on Computer Architecture
- Influential ISCA Paper Award
  - https://www.sigarch.org/awards/acm-sigarchieee-cs-tcca-influential-isca-paper-award/
- 25 years of ISCA (1973-1995)
  - https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/285930
- ISCA@50 Retrospective: 1996-2020
  - https://www.sigarch.org/isca50-retrospective-1996-2020/
  - https://sites.coecis.cornell.edu/isca50retrospective/
MICRO Test of Time (ToT) Award - http://www.microarch.org/Micro-ToT-Award/