Computer Systems (Competence)

'This course aims to introduce non-computing students to (a) the common principles and concepts in computer systems: abstraction, layering, indirection, caching, hierarchical naming, prefetching, pipelining, locking, concurrency; (b) the inner workings of a computing device, including hardware (CPU, memory, disks), operating systems (kernels, processes and threads, virtual memory, files), and applications (Web, databases).'