Activity 8, 9 and 10 of introduction to computer system

Activity 8
1) The following figure illustrates a basic personal computer system. You can see different
controllers and interfaces connected to the bus. What are the purposes of having these
controllers and interfaces?
The purposes of having these controllers and interfaces are to interact with each other
whenever certain data enter in main system from the input devices. They also help in the
researching, collection, sharing an many more others of any kind of information, data.
2) What is the difference between a personal computer and a mainframe computer? Compare
the
architectures and applications.
The difference between a personal computer and a mainframe computer are as follows:

Personal computer Mainframe computer

They are made for the general purpose having
less capability, small in size.
The operating systems of personal computer are
windows, OS X, Linux etc.
They are generally power packed
is used for extreme work operations in large
institutions.
They provide high reliability with hardware
utilization.

They can be bought in affordable price. They are expensive than personal computer.
They are medium in size and does not consume They are large and consume a lot of power.
a lot of power.

3) How a supercomputer is different from a mainframe computer?

Supercomputers are more reliable, fast, can used for complex operations, mathematical
problem, can execute billions of instructions within a second but mainframe computer are
mainly used for a storage of a large data information as well as they are slow in speed, small in
size than a supercomputer. Supercomputers are more expensive than a mainframe computer.
Mainframe computers are built to handle a large variety of tasks than a supercomputer.
4)What is DMA controller? How is it useful in memory access?
DMA controller is a part of a computer systems that allows a hardware system to access main
system and generate memory-addresses.
It helps the devices to transfer data directly from one memory to another memory in memory
access.
5) Describe the following buses and their hierarchy

 Memory bus (front-side bus)

Type of computer bus that connect electrical devices components to transfer information,
data, addresses from the main memory to CPU.

 Processor bus
It is also called front-side bus that helps to connects processor of a computer to a north bridge
chip.

 Backplane bus
It is an electrical connector that joins many circuits together that helps in a forming a complete
computer bus.

 Cache bus
It is also called back side bus that operates a system bus in a very high speed to communicate
with its cache memory.
6) Compare USB 2 and USB 3 standards

USB 2 USB 3
It gives a rate of 480 megabits per second. It gives a rate of 5 gigabits per second.
. It has a slow speed so its communicating It is ten times faster than a USB 2.0.
speeds very low than USB 3.

7) What is the purpose of using channel architecture used in mainframe computers? Explain
with a suitable diagram.
: The main purpose of using channel architecture is to increase the speed of a Data transfer rate
between the DRAM memory and the memory controller. It also helps in the separation of I/O
processor that serves as a CPU for I/O operations. It also helps to connect sub channels to a
control unit.
8) What is a computer cluster? What are the advantages of having a cluster?
Computer cluster is a set of connections of computers that works together which can be viewed
as a single system containing each node set to perform the same task.
The advantages of having a cluster are:

 It helps to increase computing power by combining the power of individual computer

systems.
 It has High Availability
 It has Load Balancing
9) Why in most cases supercomputers are built as Beowulf clusters? What are the applications
for which you need a supercomputer?
In most of the cases supercomputers are built as Beowulf clusters because they are simple,
highly configurable, easy to use, has a low affordable price, networking is easy to understand as
it is connected by Ethernet network as well as its configuration part has a basic model. So, they
are built as Beowulf clusters.
The applications for we need a supercomputer are as weather forecasting, designing of highly
graphited games, research of nuclear energy and so on.

Activity 9
1) Operating system is an important software component of a computer system. What are the
basic functionalities provided by an operating system to a user?

 It accepts commands and requests from user and their programs with required output
results.
  It manages loads and execute programs and manage hardware resources of computer.
2)What is the difference between multiprocessing and multitasking?
Multitasking- it executes multiple programs by using only one cpu.it support multiuser systems
Multiprocessing- simultaneously processing of multiple programs with multiple CPU or cores.
3) One of the basic services of an operating system is loading, managing and executing
programs. Why do you need an operating system for this purpose?
We need an operating software for this purpose because it act as an interface between the
user of computer and computer hardware.
4)What are the file management services offered by a general operating system?
The general file management service offered by general operating software are:

 Directory structure for each I/O device

 Tools to copy, move, store files
 Security mechanism to protect files
 Information about each file in the system and the tools to access that information
5) An operating system may consist of a memory resident part and memory non-resident part.
What is the main difference between these two parts? Why some components should be
memory resident?
Memory resident means remains in memory while computer is running called Kermel whereas
other parts are nonresident of the operating system these instructions remain on a storage
until they are needed.
6) Give examples for GUI and CLI operating systems

 GUI example- windows, scrollbars, buttons, wizards, painting pictures, alternative icons
etc.
 CLI example-PYTHON
7) What is the difference between a process and thread?
Threads running in shared memory whereas process running in separate memory. thread is a
segment of process it means process contain multiple threads.
9) Five programs are concurrently running on a 2.5 GHz processor sharing CPU time equally.
i. What is the cycle time of this processor
½.5*10 power 9= 0.4 nanoseconds
ii. If one quantum is five clock cycles how long would the CPU allow one program to execute
continuously?
5*0.4 nanoseconds
iii. Hence how long a program should wait to use the CPU again after completing an allocated
quantum?
8 nanoseconds
10) What is the kernel of an operating system?
A kernel is the central part of an operating system. It manages the operations of the computer
and the hardware, most notably memory and CPU time. A micro kernel, which only contains
basic functionality; A monolithic kernel, which contains many device drivers.
11) Briefly explain the architectures of monolithic, hierarchical and microkernel operating
systems.
A large executable binary program Monolithic Kernel runs all the basic system services like
process management, Memory management, I/O communication, and interrupt handling, file
system, etc in kernel space.
In this type of Kernel approach, the entire operating system runs as a single program in kernel
mode. The operating system is written as a collection of procedures that are linked together
into a large executable binary program. Monolithic Kernel runs all the basic system services like
process management, Memory management, I/O communication, and interrupt handling, file
system,
etc in kernel space. In this type of Kernel approach, the entire operating system runs as a single
program in kernel mode.
Microkernel is a software which contains the required minimum number of functions, data, and
features to implement an operating system. It provides a minimal number of mechanisms,
which is good enough to run the most basic functions of an operating system. It allows other
parts of the operating system to be implemented as it does not impose a lot of policies.
Hierarchical architecture views the whole system as a hierarchy structure, in which the
software system is decomposed into logical modules or subsystems at different levels in the
hierarchy. This approach is typically used in designing system software such as network
protocols and operating systems.

Activity 10

1) How the layered network models help to understand the network functionality?

 It assists in protocol design.

  It speeds up packet delivery.
 It prevents designers from creating their own model.
 It prevents technology in one layer from affecting other layers.
 It ensures a device at one layer can function at the next higher layer.
2) What is TCP/IP model? Briefly explain the operation of networks at each layer.
There are five layers in TCP model

 Physical layer where actual communication takes place

 Datalink layer: packet at this layer called frames. It is responsible for transmission
packets between to nodes
 Network layer: responsible for addressing packets to the final destination
 Transport layer: provide service to support the end-to-end communications. Message is
divided into packets at this stage
 Application layer: message is created. Sockets provide an interface between application
ad network layer.
3) Data rate is an important characteristic of a communication channel. What is the data rate in
Mbps if a channel takes 30 minutes download a 2 GB file?
Data rate= size of file/time taken
1GB=1024MB
2GB=2*1024*8 Mb
=2*1024*8 Mb/30*60 sec=16384/1800Mb/sec
4) Explain the difference between circuit switching and packet switching.
In circuit switching path is established between source and destination before starting the
transmission whereas in packet switching route is decided for each packet during transmission.

5) Which layer of the TCP/IP model processes requests from hosts to make sure a connection is
made to the appropriate port?
Transport layer
6) Compare TCP and UDP protocols in terms of reliability and data transfer rate.
TCP is reliable it gives guarantee that data will deliver to the sender, connection oriented,
segment sequencing, acknowledge segments whereas UDP doesn’t not however UDP is faster
than TCP.
7) What is the length of an IPv4 address?
32 BITS
8) The IP address and subnet mask of a certain PC has been found to be 130.10.10.10 and
255.255.0.0. Find the network part and host part of this IP address.
It belongs to class b so there are same number of host and network bits.
130.10 represent network part and 10.10 represent host part.