CPE1002

Computer equipment and operating systems

E McPherson

6 points - 4 hours per week - First, summer semester - Peninsula - Prohibitions: CFR1125, COT1140, CSC2020, GCO1815, RDT2141

Objectives On successful completion of this subject the student should have acquired a working knowledge of the vocabulary appropriate to computer equipment and operating systems; understand the relationships that exist between concrete and/or abstract entities; be able to independently interpret a set of work requirements and determine how well a product meets those requirements; have acquired the technical skills necessary to perform simple maintenance and upgrades to a computer system.

Synopsis Binary arithmetic: logical and arithmetic operations in binary. Specifications and functionalities of computer components; CPU registers, ALU, data paths, RISC/CISC, instruction sets, FPU, fetch-execution cycle, SMP, branch lookahead, endian representation, code sets (ASCII, EBCDIC, UNICODE); memory - different kinds of memory and their design criteria, cache and its usage; I/O - buses, speed differences between system and I/O buses, DMA/PIO, peripherals: keyboard, monitor, disk, printers, I/O interfaces and standards: parallel/serial. Data storage and technologies; firmware - interrupt handlers, monitors, bootup programs. Operating system concepts: kernel and processes, kernel calls, virtual machines, state transitions, concurrency of processes: locks, semaphores, virtual memory - paging and segmentation. Security and access controls, file system - local and network file systems. File access and organisation - sequential, relative and indexed files.

Assessment Examination (3 hours): 60% Practical work: 40%

Prescribed texts

Flynn I M and McHoes A M Understanding operating systems 2nd edn, PWS, 1997

Recommended texts

Messmer H-P The indispensable PC hardware book: Your hardware questions answered 2nd edn, Addison-Wesley, 1995
Parker C S Understanding computers: Today and tomorrow Exact edn, Dryden, 1996
Silberschatz A and Galvin PB Operating system concepts 5th edn, Addison-Wesley, 1997

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