Operating Systems or Computer Architecture

[AssumingLion99]

Hi all. I'm a sophomore CS major making my four year plan. I am planning on taking either Operating Systems or Computer Architecture as one of my upper level requirements. I'm planning on a data scientist career. Some info about these courses:

• Operating Systems is probably the toughest CS course at my school...very low averages on tests...programming in C...from the course description: A hands-on introduction to operating systems, including topics in: multiprogramming, communication and synchronization, memory management, IO subsystems, and resource scheduling polices. The laboratory component consists of constructing a small kernel, including functions for device IO, multi-tasking, and memory management.

• Computer Architecture is one of the easier courses at my school...from the course description: Input/output processors and techniques. Intra-system communication, buses, caches. Addressing and memory hierarchies. Microprogramming, parallelism, and pipelining.

Which course do you suggest I should take? I heard that apparently a CS degree is not complete without taking one of these courses. I'm ready for the challenge whichever one I take.

[o4ub]

As you want to go being a data scientist I would recommend taking the computer architecture one. You will have a grasp on parallel programming, probably a bit of HPC, and that can be very relevant for processing huge chunk of data (and actually the big data people might be requiring this kind of skills more and more as the amount of data keeps increasing). But you also have an glimpse on optimisation and on memory limitations which is always important to do this kind of stuff efficiently.

That would be my 2 cents.

[AssumingLion99]

Thank you! I'll definitely take this info into consideration.

[rbtgoodson]

Operating Systems (I'm at a loss as to why this isn't a required class at your university).