Review for the Final Exam

Ch. 8 - Interfacing Processors and Peripherals

• Amdahl's law and I/O performance
• I/O Performance Measures
  • Response time
  • Data bandwidth
  • Operations/time
• Disks and disk access time
• Dependability, reliability, and availability
  • MTTF
  • MTTR
  • MTBF
  • Availability = MTTF/MTBF
• RAID
  • Striping (improve throughput)
  • Redundancy (improve reliability)
    • mirroring
    • error correcting/detecting codes
• Networks
  • Network layers
  • Network delays
• Buses
  • Synchronous and asynchronous
  • Serial and parallel
  • Bus masters and bus slaves
  • Bus arbitration (Multiple Masters)
  • Bus handshake
  • Multibus systems and bridges
• Operating system interface
  • I/O command options
    • Dedicated I/O instructions
    • Memory-mapped I/O
  • I/O notification options
    • Polling
    • Interrupts
• Data Transfer
  • Importance of block transfers
  • Direct Memory Access (DMA)
• System on a Chip (SOC)

Ch. 9 - Multiprocessors

• Amdahl's law and Parallel Processing
• Multiprocessor Uses
• Multiple programs in parallel
• Multithreaded servers
• Parallelized programs
• Important Choices
  • Interconnection - shared processor-memory bus vs. networked
  • Memory address space - shared vs. private
  • Memory organization - centralized (UMA) vs. distributed (NUMA)
  • Communication - shared data vs. messages
  • Dependence of communication on address space sharing
• Important Issues
  • Coordination (synchronization)
    • Implicit in messaging
    • Memory locks for address space sharing
  • Cache coherence for shared address space
    • write policy: write-invalidate or write-update
    • snooping
    • the MSI cache coherence protocol
• Shared System Bus
  • Higher performance
  • Limited scalability
• Networked
  • Lower performance
  • Highly scalable
• Clusters
  • Networked off-the-shelf processors
  • Also hybrids
• Network Topologies
  • Fully-connected
  • Ring
  • 2-D mesh
  • n-cube
  • Crossbar
  • Omega

Earlier Material

You should also see the following:

1. Review for Midterm I
2. Review for Midterm II