================================================= Assignment #02 - Fundamental Computer Terminology ================================================= - Ian! D. Allen - idallen@idallen.ca - www.idallen.com Available online: Tuesday January 19, 2010 Upload due date in the Blackboard Assignment Area: Upload "assignment02.txt" before 13:00 (1 pm) on Tuesday January 26, 2010 Do *not* use the DigitalDropbox to submit your answers. Answers will be posted shortly after the due date/time. Submission method: Upload via the "Assignments" CST8281_Assignment_02 upload. Use the file name given above. Upload only one single file of plain text, not HTML, not MSWord. No fonts, no word-processing. Plain text only. Did I mention that the format is plain text (Notepad)? Due to bugs in Blackboard, you can only submit your Assignment to me *once*. After that, you cannot submit any more times. If you need to re-submit it, you have to email me to ask me to clear your previous submission. Do *not* use the DigitalDropbox to submit your answers. Answers will be posted after the due date/time so that you can check your answers before coming to labs and ask questions about the answers in the labs. Please check your answers (and my answers!). I go over each assignment in the lab if there are questions about the answers. No questions means no review - I'll presume you know the material. Questions similar to ones on these assignments will appear on your tests and exams. Not all assignments will be marked. See the Week 1 Notes for details. ============================================================================== Edit this file and answer the following questions. Upload the file containing the answers before the due date. Some of the answers below will require reading the URL links published in the weekly notes. 1. Are hardware and software equivalent? Can you really do anything in hardware that you can do in software, and vice-versa? Examples? 2. What are the three basic-level pieces of a digital computer? 3. Which of these measurements are powers of two, and which are powers of ten? a) amount of hard disk capacity? b) amount of CDROM capacity? c) computer memory size? d) processor speed (clock frequency)? e) processor bus speed (e.g. PCI bus or front side bus or memory bus)? f) network card speed? g) dial-up modem speed? h) ADSL modem speed? i) Distances in kilometres? 4. Give two reasons why you can't store 12GB of system memory on a hard drive with an advertised capacity of 12GB. 5. What is the difference between writing KB (kilobyte) and KiB (kibibyte) and MB (megabyte) and MiB (mebibyte)? 6. What is the prefix used for a thousand Terabytes? 7. What is the "random access memory wall"? 8. Why is the abbreviated name of the standards body "ISO" deliberately chosen not to be an acronym? 9. Find out the specifications for the best machine you own and answer these questions about its hardware: a) How much main memory (in MB or GB)? b) How much accessible local disk space (in GB or TB)? c) How many processors? d) How fast is each processor (in MHz or GHz)? e) How fast is the fastest network card (in Mbits/second)? 10. If a memory has an access time of 50ns, how many accesses can you make in one second (give the answer in GHz)? 11. If a CPU has a clock frequency of 3.2 GHz, how long (in ns) does one access cycle take? 12. Cache memory is faster than main memory. Why not make all the memory in the computer cache memory? 13. Why isn't a disk that rotates at 10,000 RPM exactly twice as fast as a disk that rotates at 5,000 RPM? What else is involved? 14. What is the most noticeable physical difference between a cable carrying a serial signal and a cable carrying a parallel signal? 15. Display monitor refresh rates used to be an important factor in choosing a clear display. Why are these refresh rates less important now? 16. What is the standards group responsible for the Internet standards? Give the full name and the 4-letter acronym. 17. In the world of Internet standards, what do the letters "RFC" stand for? 18. What is the modern version of Moore's Law? 19. Why can't Moore's law continue indefinitely? 20. Put these terms in order, from most general (high level) to most specific (low level): CPU microcode CPU Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) Logic gates Microprocessor Assembly Language Java or C++ Language 21. Why do computer programmers always start counting with zero (0), and not with one (1)? 22. Whose name is attached to the idea of a computer that can store its programs and instructions in memory (a stored-program computer)? 23. What is the "von Neumann bottleneck"? 24. What are some ways to work around the "von Neumann bottleneck"? 25. Describe briefly the three steps of the cycle that computers use to run programs. 26. What is the closest power of two to 1000 (i.e. closest to 10**3)? 27. How many ns (nanoseconds) are in a ms (millisecond)? 28. How may KiB are in a GiB? 29. What is 2**16 in decimal? 30. A computer has a 32-bit word size. What is the largest size memory it can address, in GiBi? 31. By what order of magnitude (power of 10) is something that runs in nanoseconds (e.g. a CPU) faster than something that runs in milliseconds (e.g. a hard disk)? 32. You have a program that takes 10 minutes to finish, running entirely in the computer's memory. With a bigger data set, you need to change the program to access the hard disk instead of memory. You change the program so that *all* accesses are via the slower hard disk. Roughly how long (in years) will it now take your "10-minute" program to finish? 33. Exactly how many bytes (in decimal) are in 4GiB of memory? 34. Exactly how many bytes (in decimal) are on an advertised 4GB hard disk? 35. How many power-of-two TiB are on an advertised 1.5TB hard disk? 36. By what percentage is a power-of-two TiB larger than a power-of-ten TB? -- | Ian! D. Allen - idallen@idallen.ca - Ottawa, Ontario, Canada | Home Page: http://idallen.com/ Contact Improv: http://contactimprov.ca/ | College professor (Free/Libre GNU+Linux) at: http://teaching.idallen.com/ | Defend digital freedom: http://eff.org/ and have fun: http://fools.ca/