April, 2009

In 2009 the department eliminated 6.170, which had long been the required 6-3 laboratory subject, intending to replace it with several subjects from which students may choose. These subjects also satisfy the department laboratory requirement for 6-1 and 6-2 students.

For students in the old curriculum (available through the class of 2010), the subject 6.005 may be used for the CS Lab for 6-3 students and as the department lab for 6-1 and 6-2 students. 6.005 will carry 12 edps. Old curriculum students who then take a CS lab may use the lab as an EC elective.

For students in the new curriculum (available to the class of 2010 and beyond), the new subject 6.172 (taught last year as 6.197), 6.035 or 6.813 may be used for this requirement. Please note that if either 6.035 or 6.813 are used to satisfy the laboratory requirement they can not also count as Advanced Undergraduate Subjects.

6.172 Performance Engineering of Software Systems Fall Term Undergraduate
Prereq: 6.004, 6.005, 6.006
Units: 3-6-3

A hands-on, project-based introduction to building efficient, high-performance and scalable software systems. Topics include: performance analysis, algorithmic techniques for high performance, instruction-level optimizations, cache and memory hierarchy optimization, parallel programming, and building scalable distributed systems.
Saman Amarasinghe