Systems and Architecture Specialisation

Total units 24 Units

Areas of interest Software Engineering, Advanced Computing, Computer Systems
Specialisation code SYAR-SPEC

Academic career Undergraduate

Computer systems and computer system architectures provide critical resources for modern computing environments. This ranges from resources for generally purpose user application programming, to highly specialised real time embedded development environments. By gaining a deep understanding of these systems a developer can produce robust and high performing implementations. Gaining such and understanding also facilitates the exploration of better ways of providing these fundamental resources. This specialisation focuses on computer systems including their use, architecture, design, implementation, and limitations.

Depending on the chosen courses, students will learn about: concurrency and the design and implementation of concurrent programs; synchronisation approaches; operating system design; memory management; process scheduling; files systems; network layers and protocols including datalink, network, and transport layer protocols and their performance; modelling and simulation and the limitations and design of such systems; numerical calculation; developing algorithms and implementing code that yields good performance on high-performance architectures; database design methods; database query processing and optimization; and transaction and security management in a relational database management system.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion, students will have the knowledge and skills to:

Demonstrate a deep understanding of a variety of computer system approaches,
Choose an appropriate computer system approach and architecture to solve a given problem, and
Design, implement, test and evaluate different computer system approaches.