ECE 498

Fall 2026 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Aug 24-Dec 9

Credit: 1 TO 4 hours.

Subject offerings of new and developing areas of knowledge in electrical and computer engineering intended to augment the existing curriculum. See Class Schedule or departmental course information for topics and prerequisites.

0 to 4 undergraduate hours. 0 to 4 graduate hours. May be repeated in the same or separate terms if topics vary.

ECE 498 class schedule data for fall 2026
Status CRN Type Section Time Day Location Instructor Section Details
5
31770
Laboratory
Lecture
JH
JH
ARRANGED
2:00PM -3:20PM
n.a.
TR
Location Pending
3013 Electrical & Computer Eng Bldg
Huang, J
Huang, J
Availability:
Closed
Part of Term:
1
Date Range:
08/24/26-12/09/26
Credit:
4 hours
Section Title:
AI Systems & Engineering
Section Info:
In this course, we focus on teaching students practical system-building skills and toolchains for developing and fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) from scratch. It covers the entire lifecycle of developing an LLM and its enabled applications, including LLM architecture implementation, model training, fine-tuning, inference, and agentic-based applications. Along with the presentation of the entire LLM development lifecycle, we will not only discuss the basic building blocks of foundation models, but also learn the essential computing techniques and engineering skills needed for enabling functionality, efficiency, and scalability. Students will have multiple programming assignments to strengthen their understanding of the basic concepts and practice their systems-building skills. Specifically, the lecture topics will include PyTorch and development tools (software setup), CUDA implementation of tensor operators, AI infrastructure (hardware setup), the basics of foundation models (e.g., tokens, embeddings, attention mechanism, and mixtures of experts), LLM training methods, training parallelisms, data engineering, fine-tuning methods, inference engine development and deployment, prompt engineering, agent development, RAG-based LLM and applications. It is worth noting that this course focuses on exploring problem-solving approaches for LLM development. Due to limited computing resources in academia, some programming assignments of this course may not reach the industrial scale, however, the development approaches are generic. Students will obtain hands-on experience of developing and deploying LLMs throughout this course. Prerequisites: Python programming. Prior exposure to CUDA programming and machine learning will be beneficial."
Restriction(s):
Restricted to students with Senior class standing. Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign or Undergrad - Urbana-Champaign.
5
55024
Lecture
OS
11:00AM -12:20PM
TR
3017 Electrical & Computer Eng Bldg
Levchenko, K
Availability:
Closed
Part of Term:
1
Date Range:
08/24/26-12/09/26
Credit:
3 hours
Section Title:
OS Design & Implementation
Section Info:
In this course you will further develop your operating system from ECE 391. In particular, in the first half of the course, you will add the following features: a C standard library, user-space threading, multiprocessor support, performance benchmarking, signals and orderly process termination, and advanced virtual memory features (shared memory, memory-mapped files, unified buffer cache). In the second half of the course, you will implement one of: networking, an advanced file system, user and kernel ASLR, complex hardware configuration (USB or PCI), accelerators, dynamic linking, and power management. Prerequisites: ECE 391
3
80120
Lecture
RK
8:00AM -9:20AM
TR
1002 Electrical & Computer Eng Bldg
Wang, D
Availability:
Open (Restricted)
Part of Term:
1
Date Range:
08/24/26-12/09/26
Credit:
3 hours
Section Title:
Concepts in Computer Org & Des
Restriction(s):
Restricted to MENG:Elec & Computer Eng-UIUC.
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