Computer Systems

Requirements for "Computer Systems" part of "Foundations of Computer Science".

Contact professors: G. Alonso, Th. Gross, J. Gutknecht

The exam is closed book.

The exam will be given in English.

The exam will test basic understanding of computer systems as a platform for the execution of (compiled) programs. Students are NOT expected to know details of specific processor or system implementation but should, e.g., be familiar with basic concepts of the memory hierarchy or of abstractions like the stack or heap that are commonly used to execute programs.

Some of the books use examples from a variety of programming languages (Java, C, C++ and others). Students are not expected to master these languages but must know some of the basic concepts (e.g., references, pointers, and arrays, difference between an object and a reference to an object). There will be no questions about programming language details.

Literature

Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective
Bryant and O'Hallaron
Prentice Hall

Operating Systems Design and Implementation
(2nd edition)
Tanenbaum and Woodhull
Prentice Hall

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach
(3rd edition)
Hennessy and Patterson
Morgan Kaufman

Syllabus

Representation of information

• Information storage
• Integer representations
• Integer arithmetic
• Floating point arithmetic

Machine level issues 

• Instruction set principles
• Execution of programs
  - Operand access and manipulation
  - Basic pipelining
• Stack discipine
• Dealing with arrays
• Heaps

Memory Hierarchy

• Basic building blocks
• Caching
• Writing cache friendly code

Virtual memory

• Address spaces (physical, virtual)
• Address translation
• Memory protection
• Memory mapping

Basic systems concepts

• Exceptions and interrupts
• Processes and process control
• Interprocess communication
• Signals
• Non-local jumps
• Process scheduling

Concurrent programming

• Threads
• Semaphores
• Classical problems
• Deadlocks

Memory management

• Page replacement algorithms

System level input/output

• Device controllers
• Device drivers
• Interrupt handlers
• User-space I/O

File system basics

• Files
• Directories
• Security
• Protection

Computers as platforms for the execution of compiled programs

• Memory-related bugs

Study reference