Final Exam

The final exam will be comprehensive and cover all the material for the entire semester. The new material that will be covered on the final but not yet covered in a previous exam is the material from chaper 6.

Exam Format

• The exam will be held in the testing center.
• 40 multiple choice questions
• Closed book
• Access to testing center calculator
• You may NOT write on the exam
• No time limit on the exam (the average student takes about 1 3/4 hours to complete the exam)

The following tables and figures will be given on the exam:

• Instruction format diagrams
• Single-precision floating-point format
• Datapath diagram
• Rooftop diagram

Chapter 6

• What is the meaning of the following classical parallel processing terms? SISD, SIMD, MISD, and MIMD
• Understand the meaning of and difference between the following terms related to parallel computing:
  • Computer cluster
  • Multicore microprocessor
  • Hardware multithreading
  • Vector architecture
  • VLIW architectures
• What is the difference between coarse grain, fine grain, and simultaneous hardware multithreading?
• What is the difference between shared memory and message passing multi core computing?
• What is Amdahl’s law and wow does Amdahl’s law apply to parallel processing?
• What is the difference between weak scaling and strong scaling?
• What are the differences between GPU and traditional CPUs?
• What is arithmetic intensity?
• What is a Roofline Model for parallel performance?