Computer Science
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Structured Computer Organization
PCI Express -
PCI Express, the next generation of the PCI bus, is being widely adopted in today's high-performance PCs, servers and embedded applications. This high bandwidth protocol keeps the same software interface and many of the key features of PCI, but has a number of differences and new features. The biggest changes with PCI Express are the use of serial data transfers and gigahertz clock speeds, making the protocol more complex, but providing significant improvement in data throughput.
Cache -
Pronounced cash, a special high-speed storage mechanism. It can be either a reserved section of main memory or an independent high-speed storage device. Two types of caching are commonly used in personal computers: memory caching and disk caching.
Media processor -
Blue Gene is a supercomputer development project at IBM for a series of high-performance system-on-a-chip (SoC) arcitectures with minimal power demands. The series includes Blue Gene/L, Cyclops64, (formerly Blue Gene/C), Blue Gene/P and Blue Gene/Q.
Blue Gene/L, which runs on Linux, employs thousands of processors, each of which demands minimal electric current. Because Blue Gene/L dissipates relatively little energy as heat in proportion.
Pipeline -
An activity, item of information, material, or product, that is between the starting point and the completion point is 'in pipeline.'
Gate -
The simplest form of electronic logic is diode logic. This allows AND and OR gates to be built, but not inverters, and so is an incomplete form of logic. Further, without some kind of amplification it is not possible to have such basic logic operations cascaded as required for more complex logic functions. To build a functionally complete logic system, relays, valves (vacuum tubes), or transistors can be used.
Branch Prediction -
In CPU instruction execution, predicting the outcome of a branch so that those instructions may be executed in parallel with the current instructions. If the CPU guesses the wrong branch, it will take extra machine cycles to go back and execute the correct one; however, on average, if the prediction algorithms are good, overall performance is increased.
Dynamic Ram -
A type of physical memory used in most personal computers. The term dynamic indicates that the memory must be constantly refreshed (reenergized) or it will lose its contents. RAM (random-access memory) is sometimes referred to as DRAM (pronounced dee-ram) to distinguish it from static RAM (SRAM). Static RAM is faster and less volatile than dynamic RAM, but it requires more power and is more expensive.
Static Ram -
A type of RAM that is quicker than dynamic RAM and does not need to be refreshed. Because it is more expensive and holds less data than dynamic RAM, it is used primarily for cache memory.
Flip-flop -
A bistable multivibrator. A circuit which has two output states and is switched from one to the other by means of an external signal (trigger).
1hz Clock -
If so, it's a pulse stream at 1 pulse per second which is used to step the circuit through as series of actions, conditions or operations.Only oscillates at one cycle per second. In the case of a clock, that means it would be counting in seconds.
Digital Logic level -
In digital circuits, a logic level is one of a finite number of states that a signal can have. Logic levels are usually represented by the voltage difference between the signal and ground (or some other common reference point), although other standards exist. The range of voltage levels that represents each state depends on the logic family being used.
In binary logic the two levels are logical high and logical low, which generally correspond to a binary 1 and 0 respectively. Signals with one of these two levels can be used in boolean logic for digital circuit design or analysis.
In three-state logic, an output device can also be high impedance. This is not a logic level, but means that the output is not controlling the state of the connected circuit.
Interpreter -
In computing, an interpreter is a computer program that reads the source code of another computer program and executes that program.
Because it is interpreted line by line, it is a much slower way of running a program than one that has been compiled but is easier for learners because the program can bestopped, modified and rerun without time-consuming compiles.
Adder -
One that adds, especially a computational device that performs arithmetic addition.
Microarchitecture level -
Microarchitecture is the term used to describe the resources and methods used to achieve architecture specification. The term typically includes the way in which these resources are organized as well as the design techniques used in the processor to reach the target cost and performance goals. The microarchitecture essentially forms a specification for the logical implementation.
ISA level -
ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) is a standard bus (computer interconnection) architecture that is associated with the IBM AT motherboard. It allows 16 bits at a time to flow between the motherboard circuitry and an expansion slot card and its associated device(s).
Pentium 4 -
Pentium 4 (P4) is the Intel processor (codenamed Willamette) that was released in November 2000. The P4 processor has a viable clock speed that now exceeds 2 gigahertz (GHz) - as compared to the 1 GHz of the Pentium 3.P4 had the first totally new chip architecture since the 1995 Pentium Pro. The major differenceinvolved structural changes that affected the way processing takes place within the chip, something Intel calls NetBurst microarchitecture.
Embedded Computers -
Embedded computers can be compared to "computers on a chip". All in one so to speak. You will find them in all kind of appareils that surround us. Washingmachines, ticketmachines at the subway, camera's, cars, motors, sewing machines, clocks. Everywhere needing something to regulate, control of check something.
Trap -
Trapping is a term most commonly used in the prepress industry to describe the compensation for misregistration between printing units on a multicolor press. This misregistration causes unsightly gaps or white-space on the final printed work. Trapping involves creating overlaps (spreads) or underlaps (chokes) of objects during the print production process to eliminate misregistration on the press
Mouse - A device that controls the movement of the cursor or pointer on a display screen. A mouse is a small object you can roll along a hard, flat surface. Its name is derived from its shape, which looks a bit like a mouse, its connecting wire that one can imagine to be the mouse's tail, and the fact that one must make it scurry along a surface. As you move the mouse, the pointer on the display screen moves in the same direction. Mice contain at least one button and sometimes as many as three, which have different functions depending on what program is running. Some newer mice also include a scroll wheel for scrolling through long documents.
Operating System -
An operating system (OS) is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system. A user cannot run an application program on the computer without an operating system, unless the application program is self booting.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also include accounting for cost allocation of processor time, mass storage, printing, and other resources.
Race -
A consortium of European carriers, end users, and universities. In 1987, RACE sponsored project 1022 to demonstrate the feasibility of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM).The result of the RACE initiative was the R1022 ATM Technology Testbed (RATT). RACE project 2061, also known as EXPLOIT, is a more recent RACE project intended to prove the viability of integrated broadband communications (IBC) in the European Union (EU). The National Research and Education Network (NREN) was the first (1990) test-bed ATM network in the United States. Advanced Communications Technologies and Services (ACTS) was developed as the successor program to RACE, and continues that work on ATM networking and some 200 other projects.
Windows -
An enclosed, rectangular area on a display screen. Most modern operating systems and applications have graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that let you divide your display into several windows. Within each window, you can run a different program or display different data.
Windows are particularly valuable in multitasking environments , which allow you to execute several programs at once. By dividing your display into windows, you can see the output from all the programs at the same time. To enter input into a program, you simply click on the desired window to make it the foreground process.
Operaing system -
The most important program that runs on a computer. Every general-purpose computer must have an operating system to run other programs. Operating systems perform basic tasks, such as recognizing input from the keyboard, sending output to the display screen, keeping track of files and directories on the disk, and controlling peripheral devices such as disk drives and printers.
For large systems, the operating system has even greater responsibilities and powers. It is like a traffic cop -- it makes sure that different programs and users running at the same time do not interfere with each other. The operating system is also responsible for security, ensuring that unauthorized users do not access the system.
Assembly Language -
Assembly Language is a low level programming language using the human readable instructions of the CPU. On PCs, the assembly language looks like this
mov ebx, eax
mov esi, 66
mov [edx+ebx*4+4], ecx
mov [ebx], ah
To understand it you need to know that eax,ebx etc are each a 32 bit register inside the CPU. The Mov instructions just copy the value so the first line is pretty much the same as this C code
ebx = eax;
To compile this into machine code, you need an assembler. It's just a compiler for assembly language.
Low-level languages -
In computer science, a low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture. Generally this refers to either machine code or assembly language. The word "low" refers to the small or nonexistent amount of abstraction between the language and machine language; because of this, low-level languages are sometimes described as being "close to the hardware."
Low-level languages can be converted to machine code without using a compiler or interpreter, and the resulting code runs directly on the processor. A program written in a low-level language can be made to run very fast, and with a very small memory footprint; an equivalent program in a high-level language will be more heavyweight. Low-level languages are simple, but are considered difficult to use, due to the numerous technical details which must be remembered.
By comparison, a high-level programming language isolates the execution semantics of a computer architecture from the specification of the program, which simplifies development.
High level language -
A programming language such as C, FORTRAN, or Pascal that enables a programmer to write programs that are more or less independent of a particular type of computer. Such languages are considered high-level because they are closer to human languages and further from machine languages. In contrast, assembly languages are considered low-level because they are very close to machine languages.
The main advantage of high-level languages over low-level languages is that they are easier to read, write, and maintain. Ultimately, programs written in a high-level language must be translated into machine language by a compiler or interpreter.
The first high-level programming languages were designed in the 1950s. Now there are dozens of different languages, including Ada, Algol, BASIC, COBOL, C, C++, FORTRAN, LISP, Pascal, and Prolog.
Loader -
In a computer operating system , a loader is a component that locates a given program (which can be an application or, in some cases, part of the operating system itself) in offline storage (such as a hard disk ), loads it into main storage (in a personal computer, it's called random access memory ), and gives that program control of the computer (allows it to execute its instruction s).
A program that is loaded may itself contain components that are not initially loaded into main storage, but can be loaded if and when their logic is needed. In a multitasking operating system, a program that is sometimes called a dispatcher juggles the computer processor's time among different tasks and calls the loader when a program associated with a task is not already in main storage. (By program here, we mean a binary file that is the result of a programming language compilation, linkage editing, or some other program preparation process.)
Assembler -
An assembler is a program that takes basic computer instructions and converts them into a pattern of bits that the computer's processor can use to perform its basic operations. Some people call these instructions assembler language and others use the term assembly language.
Ultrasparc -
An enhanced series of SPARC chips introduced by Sun in 1995. UltraSPARC chips are 64-bit CPUs that run all 32-bit SPARC applications. The first dual core UltraSPARC came out in 2004, targeted at the midrange server market. A year later, Sun introduced the UltraSPARC T1, its first multicore and multithreaded CPU. An eight-core UltraSPARC T1 supports 32 threads of execution.
Parallel processing -
In computers, parallel processing is the processing of program instructions by dividing them among multiple processors with the objective of running a program in less time. In the earliest computers, only one program ran at a time. A computation-intensive program that took one hour to run and a tape copying program that took one hour to run would take a total of two hours to run. An early form of parallel processing allowed the interleaved execution of both programs together. The computer would start an I/O operation, and while it was waiting for the operation to complete, it would execute the processor-intensive program. The total execution time for the two jobs would be a little over one hour.
The next improvement was multiprogramming. In a multiprogramming system, multiple programs submitted by users were each allowed to use the processor for a short time. To users it appeared that all of the programs were executing at the same time. Problems of resource contention first arose in these systems. Explicit requests for resources led to the problem of the deadlock. Competition for resources on machines with no tie-breaking instructions lead to the critical section routine.
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