QMCS 360 Class Notes, # 1	Dr. Rick Smith Quantitative Methods and Computer Science
Dr. Smith Home | Research | Classes | Blackboard | Cryptosmith | QMCS Home | UST A-Z | UST Home last update: Thursday, September 08, 2005

Course overview

• Where to find information
  • Web site
  • Blackboard
• Syllabus overview
  • Text
  • Computer requirement - pretty simple
  • Classroom computers - ignore them!
  • Lectures and Notes - take your own notes, mine aren't intended to be complete
  • Assignments
    • Problem sets from the book
    • • Partly to ensure that you work with the material in the book
      • Partly to give me more information about what you understand
    • Class project
      • Study of a topic of your choice, relevant to course content
      • Write a short paper and give a presentation to the class
  • Quizzes
    • Someone complained that I don't give quizzes - I'm going to try that as an alternative to some homework this semester.
  • Grading
    • Late assignments lose 1 letter grade a day, unless excused
    • Grades posted to Blackboard
      • Contact me if a grade is not correctly
      • You have 30 days to make corrections, then grade is permanent

Operating System Topics

• Introduction - computer architecture
• Traditional Topics
  • Process Management
  • Memory Management
  • I/O Device Management
  • File Management
• Other Topics
  • Grapics Display/GUI
  • Networking
• Wrinkles
  • Multiprocessing
  • Distributed processing

Computer Internals

• Accumulator
• Microprocessor word size
• Memory address
• Instruction format: opcode, immediate operand, address operand
• Address size - memory size
• Size of address bus vs size of data bus: impact on performance
• Impact of "memory size" given in bit width = word size
• How instruction cycles work
• I/O instructions; device addresses - can device address be a memory address?