Questions and Answers of Computer Architecture

The MP3 audio format is described as “almost CD quality”. What characteristic of MP3 makes this description accurate?
Use the Web as a resource to investigate MPEG-2 [or MPEG-4]. Explain the data compression algorithm used by MPEG-2 [or MPEG-4].
Unicode is downward compatible with the Latin-1 version of 8-bit ASCII in the sense that a Unicode text file that is limited to the Latin-1 character set will be read correctly on a system that does
Provide a line-by-line explanation for the PostScript code in Figure 4.14.Figure 4.14 % procedure to draw pie slice %arguments graylevel, start angle, finish angle /wedge { 0 0 moveto setgray langlel
If you have studied COBOL, discuss the difference between numeric characters and numbers in the context of a COBOL program. Does COBOL distinguish clearly between the two? If so, in what ways?
Write a procedure similar to procedure Convert that converts a signed integer to a character string for output.
Write a program that accepts one of the seven values “MON”, “TUE”, “WED”, “THU”, “FRI”, “SAT”, and “SUN” as input and sets a variable named TODAY to the correct value of
Suppose you have a program that reads an integer, followed by a character, using the following prompt and READ statement:WRITE(Enter an integer and a character ∶READ (intval, charval);When you run
The average latency on a disk with 2200 sectors is found experimentally to be 110 msec.a. What is the rotating speed of the disk?b. What is the transfer time for one sector?
Old-fashioned twelve-inch laser video disks were produced in two different formats, known as CAV and CLV. The playing time of a CLV disk is approximately twice that of a CAV disk, although the number
A disk consists of two thousand concentric tracks. The disk is 5.2 inches in diameter. The innermost track is located at a radius of 1/2 inch from the center. The outermost track is located 2 1/2
Why is the average seek time for a hard disk much shorter than for a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM?
There is a current proposal to cut the size of an individual bit in a DVD-ROM in half so as to increase the capacity of the disk. This would cut both the width of the track and the track length
Atypical published page consists of approximately forty lines at seventy-five characters per line. How many published pages of 16-bit Unicode text would fit on a typical 600MB CD-ROM? How many
A high-quality photographic image requires 3 bytes per pixel to produce sixteen million shades of color.a. How large a video memory is required to store a 640 × 480 image during display? A 1600 ×
A 1024 × 768 image is displayed, non-interlaced, at a rate of thirty frames per second.a. If the image is stored with 64K-color resolution, which uses 2 bytes per pixel, how much memory is required
The cost of a monitor increases rapidly with increasing bandwidth. The bandwidth of a monitor is measured roughly as the number of pixels displayed on the screen per second. Calculate the bandwidth
A 1600-pixel by 900-pixel display is generated on a 14-inch (diagonal) monitor.a. How many dots per inch are displayed on this monitor?b. What is the size of an individual pixel? Would a 0.26mm pixel
What is the actual resolution of a gray scale picture printed on a 600-dot-per-inch laser printer if the gray scale is created with a 3 × 3 matrix?
In printer jargon, “replaceables” are the items that are used up as part of the printing process. What are the replaceables in a laser printer? In an inkjet printer?
Explain the difference in the method used to generate characters between graphics mode and character mode display.
Explain the difference between pixel graphics and object graphics, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each when being displayed.
What are the limitations of typewriter-type (formed character) printers that caused them to fade from popularity?
Figure 11.8 shows that a typical computer system is interconnected with a number of different buses, both internal and external. The diagram includes multiple cache buses, an external CPU bus,
Carefully explain the purpose of a bus interface.
What are the trade-offs in using a serial bus versus a parallel bus to move data from one place to another?
As described in the text, the PCI-Express bus consists of thirty-two “lanes”. As of January, 2009, each lane is capable of a maximum data rate of 500MB per second. Lanes are allocated to a device
Why is a multilane PCI-Express bus not subject to the same problem of skew as an equivalent parallel bus?
How many PCI-Express lanes are required to support a 10 GB per second Ethernet card?
PCI-Express, SATA, USB, FireWire, and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) are all serial buses used to connect external devices to a computer system. Locate the specifications or descriptions of each type.
Discuss the major differences, advantages, and disadvantages between bus I/O and channel I/O.
Explain how the three primary conditions required for DMA described in Chapter 9 of the text are met by the I/O channel architecture.
Describe how you might use a cluster to provide fault-tolerant computing. Describe the trade-offs between your solution and a single multiprocessor-based computer system solution.
Describe how you might use a cluster architecture to provide rapid scalability for a Web-based company experiencing rapid growth.
Obtain information and compare the features, capabilities, performance, and operational methods between Windows Server, Linux, and IBM zSeries clustering techniques.
Clearly and carefully discuss each of the advantages of clustering.
How does a Beowulf cluster differ from other types of clusters?
Clusters and networks are both categorized as loosely coupled systems, but they serve different purposes. Explain the differences in purpose between clusters and networks.
Discuss the trade-offs between circuit switching, packet switching, and virtual circuit switching.
Explain the differences between circuit switching and virtual circuit switching. What are the advantages of one over the other?
Explain the differences between virtual circuits and packet switching.
Consider the e-business system of a large automobile manufacturer such as Ford. List at least a dozen mission-critical ways that this system would be used to communicate between its various
A short-circuit failure is a failure in which the connection point signal line is electrically shorted to ground. Although NIC short-circuit failures are extremely rare, they do occur occasionally.
Suppose that you are trying to design a network that would be suitable for a company that is located in several buildings scattered around a town. No building is more than a 1/4 mile from another
a. Suppose you own a widespread chain of turkey tartare and sushi fast-food joints. Your tores are scattered all over the mainland United States and Canada. There are also a few stores in Western
Your cousin has asked you to help her to design a small home network for her own use.a. What are the important questions that you will need to ask as you start to consider your design?b. What are the
Draw a six-node full mesh network. How many connections did your drawing require? Does this agree with the formula in the text? (If not, fix your drawing!) How many connections would a fifty-node
A few years ago there was a major conflict between Comcast and Level 3, two major Internet backbone vendors. A Google search of the Web (try “internet backbone dispute”) will bring up the story.
Name at least four different application layer protocols other than HTTP. For each, describe the purpose of the protocol, and give a brief overview of the methodology of its operation.
The DNS database is described as “a directory system of servers”. Based upon your understanding of DNS from the text, explain the meaning of this description.
Explain the purpose of an authoritative domain name server. How does its purpose differ from that of a local DNS server.
What service is provided by a DNS root server? To whom is this service provided?
How does someone obtain a URL?
Explain the technique that is used by DNS to distribute the load of large websites.
Explain carefully the purpose and use of the sequence number and acknowledgment number in connection-oriented communications. Create a multi packet example that illustrates exactly how these packets
Why does the IP datagram require separate fields for the header length and the total datagram length, instead of combining both into a single value?
What is the purpose of an IP address mask?Suppose an IP address is identified as 222.44.66.88/24. What is the network address in this case? What is the host address? How many hosts can this network
Explain the concept of a DHCP lease. How is it obtained? How is it used? What does it provide?
Explain the operation of the Address Resolution Protocol.
The chapter notes that the physical layer is only concerned with the transmission of a sequence of bits from one point to another. Suppose that the sequence 110010011 is used as a synchronization
Prior to the invention of Ethernet, researchers at the University of Hawaii proposed a broadcast radio network called ALOHANet as a means to provide wireless links between the Hawaiian islands. Each
Discuss the trade-offs between bus-based and switched Ethernet. State the various conditions under which one or the other would be preferred and explain why.
Before effective Ethernet switching existed, some network designers used an alternative bus collision avoidance protocol known as the token bus protocol. With the token bus protocol, a “token”
The governments of Freedonia and Sylvania need to set up data communications to prevent the possibility of war. Discuss the security implications of fiber optic versus coaxial wire versus satellite
Explain the differences between TCP and UDP in the context of ordering a number of items from an online seller such as amazon.com.
In the text, we identify four different “addresses” that are normally used during the passage of a message from source to destination using TCP/IP and Ethernet. These include a
What are the specific so-called “qualities” that quality of service attempts to measure and achieve? Describe the two methods that are normally used as an attempt to achieve this quality.
Explain the purpose of non-repudiation. How does non-repudiation differ from authentication? Create a business scenario that illustrates the importance of each.
Packages and high-priority mail are handled by The Typical Large Corporation (TyplCorp) in a way that is typical of large corporations. Each company building has a centralized mailroom where packages
Describe clearly, step-by-step, and layer-by-layer, the operation that takes place when passing a datagram through an intermediate node in a switching network.
Is it possible to build a network that can simultaneously recognize more than one protocol suite? If so, explain how this could be done.
The TCP/IP protocol suite appears to have no equivalents to the OSI session and presentation layers. How are the services provided by those layers handled in TCP/IP? Be as specific as you can when
Each of the input and output ports on a router has a separate physical address. Why is this an important requirement for the operation of a router in a network?
Explain the relationship between corresponding layers at the source and destination nodes of a TCP/IP communication connection.
Locate and read the proposed standard and test report for the “IP over Avian Carrier” proposed standard. Explain how this proposed standard fulfills the requirements of the TCP/IP model.
Locate protocol information for the IBM System Network Architecture (SNA) model. Compare the operation of SNA with that of TCP/IP.
Locate, download, and install a packet-sniffing software package, such as WireShark. Experiment with this software until you understand how it works and the range of its capabilities. Write a brief
As an alternative alphanumeric code, consider a code where punched holes in the columns of a card represent alphanumeric codes. The punched hole represents a €œ1€; all other bits
ASCII, Unicode, and EBCDIC are, of course, not the only possible codes. The Sophomites from the planet Collegium use the rather strange codeshownin Figure E4.1. There are only thirteen characters in
What character string does the binary ASCII code1010100 1101000 1101001 1110011 0100000 1101001 11100110100000 1000101 1000001 1010011 1011001 0100001represent?
a. What is the ASCII representation for the numeral −3.1415 in binary? in octal? in hexadecimal? in decimal?b. What is the EBCDIC representation for the numeral +1,250.1? (Include the comma.)
a. Create a table that shows the ASCII and EBCDIC representations side-by-side for each of the uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and numerals.b. Does the hexadecimal representation show you a
Write a computer program in a language appropriate for you that converts mixed numbers between decimal and binary in both directions.
What is the decimal value of the following binary numbers?a. 1100101.1b. 1110010.11c. 11100101.1
Convert the following numbers from decimal to binary and then to hexadecimal:a. 27.625b. 4192.37761
Convert the following numbers from their given base to decimal:a. 0.10010012b. 0.3A216c. 0.2A112
Convert the following numbers from decimal to hexadecimal. If the answer is irrational, stop at four hexadecimal digits:a. 0.6640625b. 0.3333c. 69/256
Using whatever programming language is appropriate for you, write a program that converts a whole number input from decimal to hexadecimal.
Using whatever programming language is appropriate for you, write a program that converts whole numbers in either direction between binary and hexadecimal.
Using whatever programming language is appropriate for you, write a program that converts a whole number input by the user from base 8 to base 10. Your program should flag as an error any input that
Convert the octal number 277458 to hexadecimal. Do not use decimal as an intermediary for your conversion. Why does a direct octal-hexadecimal conversion not work in this case? What can you use
Convert the base 3 number 2101023 to octal. What process did you use to do this conversion?
a. Convert the base 4 number 130230314 directly to hexadecimal. Check your result by converting both the original number and your answer to decimal.b. Convert the hexadecimal number 9B6216
Select a number base that would be suitable for direct conversion from base 3, and convert the number 220112103 to that base.
Convert the following hexadecimal numbers to binary:a. 4F6Ab. 9902c. A3ABd. 1000
Convert the following binary numbers directly to hexadecimal:a. 101101110111010b. 1111111111110001c. 1111111101111d. 110001100011001
Using the multiplication method, convert the following numbers to decimal:a. 11000101001000012b. C52116c. 3ADF16d. 245567
Using the division method, convert the following decimal numbers to binary:a. 4098b. 71269c. 37In each case, check your work by using the power of each digit to convert back to decimal.
Using the division method, convert the following decimal numbers:a. 13750 to base 12b. 6026 to hexadecimalc. 3175 to base 5
Using the powers of each digit in hexadecimal, convert the decimal number 6026 to hexadecimal.

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