This course provides students with a solid understanding of fundamental architectural techniques used in today\'s high-performance processors and systems. Course topics include memory hierarchies (caches and virtual memory), cache coherence, instruction level parallelism, parallel architectures classification, vector processing, introduction to shared memory multiprocessors, multithreading, multicore, GPU. Parallel programming models and multiprocessors network topologies. An emphasis will be both on hardware and software issues specially related to parallel programming.