One of a pair of topics courses in high performance computing technology, with an emphasis on using KAUST’s research computing systems, focusing primarily on hardware architectures. History of high performance computing. Hardware architectures. CMOS processor design. Cache architectures. Memory architectures. Hardware counters. Processing benchmarks. Considerations of electrical power. Single-node performance of real applications. I/O systems and communication networks. Communication benchmarks. (AMCS/CS 311 and 312 may be taken without the other, or together in either order.)