This book presents a coherent approach to computer system design that encompasses many, if not most, of the design problems and solutions options. Covers not only the basic "tricks" and techniques, but also the relationships between software and hardware levels of system implementation and operation.

Computer Systems Architecture provides IT professionals and students with the necessary understanding of computer hardware. It addresses the ongoing issues related to computer hardware and discusses the solutions supplied by the industry. The book describes trends in computing solutions that led to the current available infrastructures, tracing the initial need for computers to recent concepts such as the Internet of Things. It covers computers’ data representation, explains how computer architecture and its underlying meaning changed over the years, and examines the implementations and performance enhancements of the central processing unit (CPU). It then discusses the organization, hierarchy, and performance considerations of computer memory as applied by the operating system and illustrates how cache memory significantly improves performance. The author proceeds to explore the bus system, algorithms for ensuring data integrity, input and output (I/O) components, methods for performing I/O, various aspects relevant to software engineering, and nonvolatile storage devices, such as hard drives and technologies for enhancing performance and reliability. He also describes virtualization and cloud computing and the emergence of software-based systems’ architectures. Accessible to software engineers and developers as well as students in IT disciplines, this book enhances readers’ understanding of the hardware infrastructure used in software engineering projects. It enables readers to better optimize system usage by focusing on the principles used in hardware systems design and the methods for enhancing performance.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th Asia-Pacific Computer Systems Architecture Conference, ACSAC 2004, held in Beijing, China in September 2004. The 45 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 154 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on cache and memory, reconfigurable and embedded architectures, processor architecture and design, power and energy management, compiler and operating systems issues, application-specific systems, interconnection networks, prediction techniques, parallel architectures and programming, microarchitecture design and evaluation, memory and I/O systems, and others.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th Asia-Pacific Computer Systems Architecture Conference, ACSAC 2006. The book presents 60 revised full papers together with 3 invited lectures, addressing such issues as processor and network design, reconfigurable computing and operating systems, and low-level design issues in both hardware and systems. Coverage includes large and significant computer-based infrastructure projects, the challenges of stricter budgets in power dissipation, and more.

On behalf of the ProgramCommittee, we are pleased to present the proceedings of the 2005 Asia-Paci?c Computer Systems Architecture Conference (ACSAC 2005) held in the beautiful and dynamic country of Singapore. This conference was the tenth in its series, one of the leading forums for sharing the emerging research ?ndings in this ?eld. In consultation with the ACSAC Steering Committee, we selected a - member Program Committee. This Program Committee represented a broad spectrum of research expertise to ensure a good balance of research areas, - stitutions and experience while maintaining the high quality of this conference series. This year’s committee was of the same size as last year but had 19 new faces. We received a total of 173 submissions which is 14% more than last year. Each paper was assigned to at least three and in some cases four ProgramC- mittee members for review. Wherever necessary, the committee members called upon the expertise of their colleagues to ensure the highest possible quality in the reviewing process. As a result, we received 415 reviews from the Program Committee members and their 105 co-reviewers whose names are acknowledged inthe proceedings.Theconferencecommitteeadopteda systematicblind review process to provide a fair assessment of all submissions. In the end, we accepted 65 papers on a broad range of topics giving an acceptance rate of 37.5%. We are grateful to all the Program Committee members and the co-reviewers for their e?orts in completing the reviews within a tight schedule.