Computer components

CPU - Central Processor Unit

(e.g., G3, Pentium III, RISC)
RAM - Random Access Memory
(generally lost when power cycled)
VRAM - Video RAM (amount sets
screen size and color depth)
ROM -Read Only Memory (used
for boot)
IO Input/Output: IO through
interfaces such as SCSI (Small
Computer System Interface), USB
(Universal Serial Bus), Firewire
(video standard), Ethernet
HD - Hard Disk Drive (permanent
storage); CDROM - Compact Disk
Read-only-memory; CD-RW; DVD
Read/Write

Computer Architecture
Computer Organization

The von Neumann architecture

Same storage device for both instructions and data

Computer Architecture
Device Controllers
Memory mapped I/O
Direct Memory Access (DMA)

Instruction Set
Data transfer operations
Arithmetic / logic operations
Control flow instructions

The architecture of a hypothetical

machine

Computer basics
Smallest thing a computer knows is a bit 0 or 1
(false/true)
CPU knows how to perform and, or, xor
(exclusive or) operations
And returns true if both same
Or returns true if either true
Xor returns true if different

CPU is a massive collection of and and or gates

A specific CPU has a set of instructions it can
execute (usually 50-100, machine language)

Basics
The number of instructions per seconds is set by
the clock speed, e.g., 500 MHz Pentium III
One clock tick is called a cycle, modern CPUs
can often execute more than one instruction per
cycle
All programs end up as set of instructions to be
executed by the CPU (compilers/linkers or
interpreters do this for you)
Floating point speed is measured in floating
point operations per seconds, or flops

Bits/Bytes and words

Bits are grouped into larger units
8 bits = 1 byte (still common)
2/4/8 bytes = word (varies between CPU)
Most desktop machines are 32-bit words but
64 bits machines are becoming more common
(set by data bus)
Why important? Sets minimum size unit you
can access in program, and often precision

Grouping words and bytes

Number of unique values that can be
represented depends on number of bits
With n bits one can have 2n unique values
For n=8 have (byte) = 256
Grouped into larger units to represent different
data
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information
Interchange)
Basic version is 7 bit (127 characters)
A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and special characters
Values <32 are control characters

Numbers and bases

Numbers represented in different base systems
Binary base 2 (0-1)
Octal base 8 (0-7)
Hexadecimal base 16 (0-15, with A-F representing
10-15)
E.g, 5410=3616=668=1101102

Prefixes: kilo = 1024; mega=1048576;

giga=10737741824 (approximately 103,106,109)

Program Execution
The machine cycle

The composition of an instruction

for a machine

Stored Program

Performing the fetch step of the

machine cycle I

Performing the fetch step of the

machine cycle II

Decoding the instruction 35A7

Mnemonics
It is hard to remember commands as numbers
Use words associated with the numbers

Some Assembly language

Components: OS
The Operating System (OS)
Controls everything in the way the computer works.
Not Specific to a CPU type but often some OSs are
associated with specific CPUs
G3/4/5 68x series MacOS
Pentium, x86 DOS (Windows)
SPARC Solaris (Unix)

OS controls IO and memory management

Program implementations are dependent on OS

Programming interface to OS
Depending on language used, OS
interface may or may not be important
For Fortran, C, C++ when program is
linked OS routines are needed
How to read from keyboard or file?
How to write to screen or disk?

In your program you do not need to go into

the low-level (OS) details

Storage in memory
Memory may be treated as a linear array of
bytes from 1 to <size of memory>
The OS keeps track of which parts of memory
are being used and which parts are still free for
use by programs and data
Some computers do byte-swapping, i.e., the
bytes are not counted linearly but rather are
switched. The main (but not only) styles are Big
Endian (HP, Sun, Macs) and Little Endian (PC).
Affects ability to transfer binary data (TCP knows
this and will accommodate this up to a certain
degree)

Hard disks
Hard disks contain the
computers file system (allows
access through file names)
Directory structure points to
where files are located (reason
for having less space available
than the size of disk + some
calibration tracks)
Actual content of HD and
directories depend on OS used
(different standards exist, e.g.,
FAT16, FAT32, NTFS for
Windows, EXT2 for Linux
In general, OS can only use
their own file-system

Accessing RAM vs. HDD

The highest possible
bandwidth (peak
bandwidth) for the various
types of RAM
However, RAM also has to
match the motherboard,
chipset and the CPU
system bus

HDD ~ only 80MB/s

In MATLAB: try save,
load, pack, clear

Module type

Max.
Transfer, MB/s

SD RAM, PC100

800

SD RAM, PC133

1064

Rambus, PC800

1600

Rambus, Dual PC800

3200

DDR 266 (PC2100)

2128

DDR 333 (PC2700)

2664

DDR 400 (PC3200)

3200

DUAL DDR PC3200

6400

DUAL DDR2-400

8600

DUAL DDR2-533

10600

RAM and fast RAM/cache

A CPU cache is a cache used
by the central processing unit of
a computer to reduce the
average time to access memory
Access time: roughly speaking
CPU speed against the bus speed

Integers
Integer numbers can be represented exactly (up
to the range allowed by the number of bytes)
A 2-byte integer, unsigned 0-65535, signed
32767 (sometimes called short)
A 4-byte integer, unsigned 0-4294967295,
signed 2147483827
(With a 32-bit address bus, can have 4Gbytes of
memoryreason max memory is limited in
computers)

Floating point
Representations vary between machines (often
reason binary files can not be shared)

Precise layout of bits depends on machine and

format; all formats are (mantissa)*2(exponent)

The IEEE standard for floating

point arithmetic
Single precision (32 bits=4 bytes)
S EEEEEEEE FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
01
89
31
The value V represented by the word may be determined as follows:
If E=255 and F is nonzero, then V=NaN ("Not a number")
If E=255 and F is zero and S is 1, then V=-Infinity
If E=255 and F is zero and S is 0, then V=Infinity
If 0<E<255 then V=(-1)S * 2(E-127) * (1.F) where "1.F" is intended to represent
the binary number created by prefixing F with an implicit leading 1 and a
binary point
If E=0 and F is nonzero, then V=(-1)S * 2 (-126) * (0.F). These are
"unnormalized" values.
If E=0 and F is zero and S is 1, then V=-0
If E=0 and F is zero and S is 0, then V=0

Single precision floating point

In particular
0 00000000 00000000000000000000000 = 0
1 00000000 00000000000000000000000 = -0
0 11111111 00000000000000000000000 = Infinity
1 11111111 00000000000000000000000 = -Infinity
0 11111111 00000100000000000000000 = NaN
1 11111111 00100010001001010101010 = NaN
0 10000000 00000000000000000000000 = +1 * 2(128-127) * 1.0 = 2
0 10000001 10100000000000000000000 = +1 * 2(129-127) * 1.101 = 22*(23+22+1)/23 = 6.5
1 10000001 10100000000000000000000 = -1 * 2(129-127) * 1.101 = -6.5
0 00000001 00000000000000000000000 = +1 * 2(1-127) * 1.0 = 2(-126)
0 00000000 10000000000000000000000 = +1 * 2(-126) * 0.1 = 2(-127)
0 00000000 00000000000000000000001 = +1 * 2(-126) *
0.00000000000000000000001 =
2(-149) (Smallest positive value)

Double precision floating point

S EEEEEEEEEEE FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
01
11 12
63

The value V represented by the word may be determined as follows:

If E=2047 and F is nonzero, then V=NaN ("Not a number")

If E=2047 and F is zero and S is 1, then V=-Infinity
If E=2047 and F is zero and S is 0, then V=Infinity
If 0<E<2047 then V=(-1)S * 2(E-1023) * (1.F) where "1.F" is intended to represent
the binary number created by prefixing F with an implicit leading 1 and a binary
point.
If E=0 and F is nonzero, then V=(-1)S * 2(-1022) * (0.F) These are "unnormalized"
values.
If E=0 and F is zero and S is 1, then V=-0
If E=0 and F is zero and S is 0, then V=0

Is the finite precision an issue?

An extended example: condition number of a
symmetric matrix.
Consider a system of linear equations
1000 999 x 1999

999 998 y 1997

and the perturbed system

1000 999 x 1998.99

999 998 y 1997.01

Example
Note

x 1
x + 20.97
= but =

y 1
y 18.99

What went wrong?

Recall an n-by-n matrix A is symmetric iff A=AT.
Fact (spectral decomposition):
If A is symmetric, it may be written as
A=UDUT,
where D is the diagonal matrix,
U is unitary (i.e., UUT=I, the identity matrix).

Example
Fact: U is unitary is almost the same as
U is a rotation matrix
(almost the same because U might include
reflections).
Fact: For A=UDUT as before, the diagonal
elements of D are the eigenvalues of A and
columns of U are the right eigenvectors of A.
Recall t is an eigenvalue of A iff det(A-tI)=0,
x is the corresponding right eigenvector iff
Ax=tx.

Example
How does A act on x, step-by-step:
Ax=UDUTx=UD(UTx)=U(D(UTx)),
that is, rotate, scale, rotate back.
Define the condition number of A as
(A)=|t|max(A) / |t|min(A)
where |t|max and |t|min are the largest and the smallest in
absolute value eigenvalues of A.
(A) shows how far off the solution to Ax=b may be from
the solution to Ax=b+b (a measure of relative
singularity).

Assignment 2
MATLAB and C code are posted on the web. The MATLAB script is slightly modified in an
attempt to produce a more accurate graph: the C call is referred to several times
using reps counter.
1.

2.

Using the MATLAB script from the class, try to identify the cache size on your
machine. Note that usually a number in MATLAB occupies 8 bytes (double precision
floating point), and that the function requires roughly 2-times the memory needed to
store the x vector (x in the input, x_new in the output). Explain your results. As a
sanity check, you might want to use a CPU info tool.
Condition number I: for the class example, answer the following:
a)
b)
c)
d)

3.
4.

5.

find the matrix spectral decomposition and compute the matrix condition number,
find perturbations b of the right-hand side of the equation with (the Euclidean norm) ||b||=1
that give the largest and the smallest errors in the solution vector; plot each of the two
perturbations, together with their image under UT, under D-1UT and, finally, under A-1,
given the equation for the curve ||b||=1, find its image under A-1 and plot it,
find the explicit expression for the condition number (A- I) for > 0.

Condition number II: given a 2x2 matrix with double-precision entries, what is the
worst condition number this matrix might have? Explain your answer.
Condition number III: for the question 2 of the first assignment, is there any illconditioning (ill-conditioning refers to a matrix having large condition number, hence
often resulting in numerical instability; if you happen to encounter complex
eigenvalues, you are on the wrong track; for the definition in class, matrix must be
symmetric)? Explain your answer.
Bonus question: find all the distinct spectral decompositions of the identity matrix.