Download Computer Architecture and Operating Systems

Memorial University
Department of Computer Science
PhD Comprehensive Exam Guidelines
Computer Architecture and Operating Systems
Aim: To examine candidates’ familiarity with basic concepts of computer architecture and operating systems, outlined in the Body of Knowledge of the ACM/IEEE Computer Science Curriculum 2013. The
emphasis is on high-performance computing, concurrency and parallelism, and quantitative characterization.
Duration: 1 hour.
Topics: The following core–level knowledge areas of the ACM/IEEE Computer Science Curriculum 2013
are covered: SF – Systems Fundamentals, AR – Architecture and Organization, OS – Operating Systems,
anf PD – Parallel and Distributed Computing.
AR / Digital logic and digital systems
combinatorial versus sequential logic • basic building blocks: arithmetic-logic unit, registers, central
processing unit, memory • register transfer notation, hardware description languages • physical
constraints (gate delay, fan-in, fan-out, “power wall”)
AR / Machine level representation of data
bits, bytes and words • numeric data representations and number bases • fixed- and floating-point
systems, signed and twos-complement representations • representation of non-numeric data (characters, strings, graphical data) • representation of records and arrays
AR / Assembly level machine organization
basic organization of von Neumann machine • control unit, instruction fetch, decode and execution
• instruction sets and instruction types (data manipulation, control, I/O) • instructions formats •
addressing modes • subroutine call and return mechanisms • instruction level parallelism, pipeling •
I/O and interrupts • program stack and heap • shared-memory multiprocessor/multicore organizations • introduction to SIMD versus MIMD and the Flynn taxonomy • translation of fundamental
high-level constructs to machine-language level
AR / Memory system organization and architecture
memory hierarchy, temporal and spatial locality • main memory organization • latency, cycle time,
bandwidth and interleaving • cache memories (address mapping, block size, replacement and store
policy) • cache consistency • virtual memory (page table, TLB, working set) • fault handling and
reliability • error coding, data compressions and data integrity
AR / Interfacing and communication
I/O fundamentals, buffering, programmed and iterrupt-driven I/O • interrupt structures, vectored
and prioritized interrupts • buses, bus protocols, arbitration, direct memory access (DMA) • communication networks, RAID architectures
SF / State and state machines
discrete versus continuous systems • clocks, states and state transitions, sequencing • combinational
logic, sequential logic, registers, memory • computer and network protocols as state machines
SF / Parallelism
sequential versus parallel processing • parallel versus concurrent programming • request versus task
parallelism • client-server/web services, thread (fork-join), pipelining • multicore architectures and
hardware support for synchronization
SF / Evaluation
performance metrics • workloads and benchmarking • CPI (cycles per instruction) metric and instruction set design • Amdahl’s law (the upper bound on the parallel speed-up)
SF / Proximity
latencies in computer systems • caches and the effects of temporal and spacial localities • cache
coherency in computer systems • memory hierarchy and the average memory access time
OS / Overview of operating systems
objectives and functions of operating systems • design issues (efficiency, robustness, flexibility, portability, security, compatibility) • networked, client-server, distributed operating systems
OS / Operating system principles
structuring methods (monolithic, layered, modular, micro-kernel model) • abstractions, processes,
resources • application program interfaces (APIs) • device organization • interrupts: methods and
implementations • concept of user/system state and protection, state transitions to kernel
OS / Concurrency
concurrency within the framework of an operating system • process states and state diagrams •
data structures (ready lists, process control blocks, etc.) • dispatching and context switching •
synchronization primitives • multiprocessor issues (spin-locks, reentrancy)
OS / Scheduling and dispatch
preemptive and non-preemptive scheduling • schedulers and policies • processes and threads • deadlines and real-time issues
OS / Memory management
physical memory management hardware • working sets and thrashing • caching
OS / Security and protection
overviews of system security • policy/mechanism separation • security methods and services • protection, access control and authentication • backups
PD / Parallelism fundamentals
multiple simultaneous computations • parallelism versus concurrency • parallelism, communication
and computation; programming constructs for coordinating simultaneous computations • programing
errors in non-sequential programs (data races, deadlocks, starvation)
PD / Parallel decomposition
task-based decomposition (thread implementation) • data-parallel decomposition (SIMD and MapReduce) • actors and reactive processes
PD / Communication and coordination
shared-memory communication • message-passing communication • atomicity (critical sections, transactions, mutual exclusion)
PD / Parallel algorithms, analysis and programming
critical paths, work and span, Amdahl’s law • speed-up and scalability • naturally parallel algorithms
• parallel algorithmic patterns (divide-and-conquer, map-and-reduce, master-worker)
PD / Parallel architectures
multicore processors • shared versus distributed memory • symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) • vector
processing (SIMD architectures)
References for Computer Architecture:
• J.L. Hennessy, D.A. Patterson, “Computer architecture: a quantitative approach” (5 ed.), Morgan
Kaufmann 2012 (ISBN 978-0-12-383872-8).
• A.S. Tanenbaum, “Structured computer architecture” (6 ed.); Prentice-Hall 2012 (ISBN 978-0-13291652-3).
• W. Stallings, “Computer organization and architecture” (10 ed,); Pearson 2016 (ISBN 978-0-13410229-0).
References for Operating Systems:
• A. Silbershatz, P.B. Galvin, G. Gagne, “Operating system concepts” (9 ed.), Addison-Wesley 2012
(ISBN 978-1-118-06333-0).
• A.S. Tanenbaum, “Modern operating systems” (4 ed.); Pearson 2014 (ISBN 0-13-359162-0).
• M. Milenkovic, “Operating systems: concepts and design”; McGraw Hill Education 2009 (ISBN
0-07-463272-8).
Last update: February 2017.