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Sit 311: Computer-System Architecture Question Paper

Sit 311: Computer-System Architecture

Course:Information And Communication Technology

Institution: Kenyatta University question papers

Exam Year:2010

KENYATTA UNIVERSITY
UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS 2009/2010

INSTITUTE OF OPEN LEARNING
EXAMINATION FOR THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF SCIENCE
(INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY)
SIT 311:
COMPUTER-SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
=================================================================
DATE: MONDAY 19TH JULY 2010

TIME: 2.00 P.M. - 4.00 P.M.

INSTRUCTIONS
Question one (1) carries 30 marks (Compulsory) while all other questions
carries 20 - marks each.
Answer question ONE (1) (compulsory) and any other two (2) questions.
Question 1
a)
Explain the following

1.
Hit ratio

2.
Mapping

3.
Pipeline stalling

4.
Memory

5.
Virtual memory

(10 marks)
b)
What do you mean by bus? Describe bus-system briefly.

(4 marks)
c)
Describe the following?

1.
UMA (Uniform Memory Access) model

2.
NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) model

3.
MIND (Multi Instruction Multiple Data)

(6 marks)
d)
Distinguish between the following

i)
RISC and CISC Architecture

ii)
Cache and Auxiliary memory
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iii)
Synchronous and Asynchronous message passing technique
iv)
Multiprocessing and Multitasking
v)
Shared Memory and Distributed memory.

(10 marks)
Question 2
a)
What is the Cache-coherence problem?

What are the causes of Cache-coherency?

Give the solution to this problem?

(13 marks)
b)
What is the role of Write-through and Write-back procedure in Cache-coherence?

(7 marks)
Question 3
a)
What do you understand by Flow-Mechanism?

Describe Control-flow and Data-flow mechanisms.

(10 marks)
b)
Draw a diagram showing the Four stage Pipelining execution.

(6 marks)
c)
Draw a diagram showing the Memory Hierarchy from low to high speed memories.

(4 marks)
Question 4
a)
What do you mean by parallelism?

Describe Software parallelism and Hardware parallelism.

(10 marks)
b)
Describe the language features of parallelism?

(10 marks)
Question 5
a)
Describe the role of following Parallel Programming model

i)
Shared-variable model

ii)
Message-passing model

iii)
Data-parallel model

(6 marks)
b)
Draw a Data-dependency graph to show the dependency.

(4 marks)
c)
Explain why mapping is important in cache memory organization.
(1 mark)

Describe the mapping procedures that are associated with cache memory

organization.

(9 marks)

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Sit 311: Computer-System Architecture Question Paper

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