Computer Systems Design and Architecture

This text is shaped by the design experience of the two engineers who built the first optical computer. It is the first practical introduction and survey of the common commercial architectures and the techniques used to achieve high performance in computer construction with an EE perspective.

Harry Jordan is Professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His interests in computer systems center on the interface between hardware and software. He has worked on the application and performance of multiple instruction stream computers, emphasizing the architecture and performance of such machines to the structure of parallel programming languages and algorithms. He developed one of the earliest high-level language extensions for parallel processing.

His most recent project was to build and operate an optical, stored program, digital computer. He developed designs using optical fiber for both data storage and interconnection, and successfully ran a prototype.