Systems Comprehensive Exams Topics
Patrick G. Bridges
November 23, 2004
1 Introduction
I’ve divided each of the subjects into three areas: undergraduate-level topics,
graduate-level topics, and other topics for basic familiarity. We will assume you
have in-depth, comprehensive familiarity with the undergraduate level topics
of architecture and operating systems since they are fundamental to much of
computer science. We also expect a solid grasp of the issues on the graduate-level
topics, as well as basic familiarity with the issues that arise in some specialized
sub-fields.
As far as the exam format goes, we are still discussing exactly how many
questions and their particular content and format. However, you may expect
a moderate number of questions out of which you may choose a slightly fewer
number to answer - 7 choose 5, or 6 choose 4, for example. In addition, we
may ask you to relate relevant material from other areas that you will also be
studying for the exams to portions of this exam.
2 Computer Architecture
2.1 Undergraduate-level Topics
•Amdahl’s Law
•Integer data representation, though some familiarity with the basic float-
ing point representation issues is also expected
•Basic computer organization - CPU, Memory Bus, Memory, I/O Bus, I/O
devices, etc.
•Basic processor architectures - RISC, CISC, Register-Register, Memory-
Memory, Stack machines
•Basic pipelining - forwarding, stalls, hazards, scheduling
•Memory hierarchy basics - uniprocessor caching basics (addressing the
cache, direct-mapped vs. associative, split vs. unified, write-back vs. write
through, block size issues), virtual memory hardware (TLBs, hardware
page tables, software-loaded TLBs)
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