Seminar 9: Memory models and Caching

Overview

For this week’s seminar, we’ll learn about how memory models, which characterize how the processor interacts with the CPU caches and its memory. This can teach us a lot about how modern multi-core processors really work, and what this means for how we write code in our operating system.

Learning about memory models will also be very relevant for Project 5: as part of your project: you’ll turn on the caches in your Raspberry Pi!

What you should turn in

Short instructions are coming soon! Before seminar, we’ll ask you to do the following:

• Run a tool on your own system to learn about your computer’s CPU caches, and speculate about what you think are some of the things that are important in an operating system for a processor that uses caches
• Submit any questions you have about caching! We’ll use this to guide how we structure the seminar

Overall, we expect that the whole process should take no more than 15-20min to complete. We’ll update this page later today (Tuesday, November 10) with instructions, and a form to fill out–stay tuned!