The modern computing devices are characterized by a high level of specialization according to the task they have to accomplish. However, some key concepts related to their hardware and software architectures, and their interactions, exist and their knowledge is mandatory to choose and exploit the devices to integrate systems that satisfy the computing requirements of the theoretical and experimental physics.

Those concepts will be illustrated with C-based code examples extracted from scientific applications, using the open RISC-V architecture as a reference for their execution. 

The student will familiarise with the fundamental elements of the hardware architecture (control, data-path, instruction parallelism, hierarchy of memories) and software (compiler, operating system) and will understand the impact they have on the application efficiency; eventually some basic notions of parallel programming will be introduced.

The hardware description language VHDL will be introduced and the basic knowledge of the tools for the design of today’s hardware computing systems.