FINAL EXAM – IT4272E COMPUTER SYSTEMS

Name :………………………………………………Student ID:………………..…..

Class : …………………..………….

Duration: 60 minutes Date: 08/02/2022 20211_

QUESTIONS PART

Question 1 (2p).
a) Figure out three categories of cache miss with short explanation for each type
b) Give some solutions (if yes) to reduce miss rate with each type of cache miss

Question 2 (2p). Design a 16-way set associative cache that has 32 blocks and 16 bytes per block.
The physical memory has 128KB. Calculate the following:
(a) How many bits are used for the byte offset?
(b) How many bits are used for the set (index) field?
(c) How many bits are used for the tag?

Question 3 (2p). The average memory access time for a microprocessor with 1 level of cache L1 is
2.4 clock cycles
- If data is present and valid in the cache, it can be found in 1 clock cycle
- If data is not found in the cache, 80 clock cycles are needed to get it from main memory
a) Calculate the miss rate of this cache L1 ?

Designers are trying to improve the average memory access time to 2 clock cyclesby adding a cache
L2 on chip.
- This second level of cache could be accessed in 6 clock cycles
- The addition of this cache does not affect the first level cache’s access patterns or hit times
- Main memory accesses would still require 80 additional clock cycles.
b) Calculate the hit rate of cache L2 ?

Question 4 (1p). A virtual memory system uses 43 virtual address bits, page size is 4KB and Page Table
Entry size is 4 bytes.
a) How many page table entries (PTEs) are needed?
b) How much physical memory is needed for storing the page table?

Question 5 (2p).
a) What is the average time to read or write a 512-byte sector for a typical disk rotating at 5400 RPM?
The advertised average seek time is 6ms, the transfer rate is 40MB/sec, and the controller overhead is
3ms. Assume that the disk is idle so that there is no waiting time.

b) A program repeatedly performs a three-step process: It reads in a 8KB block of data from disk, does
some processing on that data, and then writes out the result as another 8KB block elsewhere on the disk.
Each block is contiguous and randomly located on a single track on the disk. No other program is using
the disk or processor, and there is no overlapping of disk operation with processing. The processing step
takes 10 million clock cycles, and the clock rate is 400MHz.
What is the overall time performing the process ?

Question 6 (1p). Assume that you can solve a problem in parallel with 98% of your code is
parallelizable. Compare with a single core processor, to obtain a speedup of 8, how many cores are
needed ?

1/1