COMPSCI 111 / 111G An introduction to practical computing

Introduction Hardware

Teaching Staff •Damir Azhar • Office: Computer Science Building (Bldg 303S) Room 390 on Level 3 • Phone 373-7599 Ext 82391 • Email: damir.azhar@auckland.ac.nz • Office hours: Open door policy, visit any time (or email for appointment)

•Yun Sing Koh • Office: Computer Science Building (Bldg 303S) Room 485 on Level 4 • Phone 373-7599 Ext 88299 • Email: ykoh@cs.auckland.ac.nz • Office Hours: Open door policy, visit any time (or email for appointment)

•André Nies • Office: Computer Science Building (Bldg 303S) Room 565 on Level 5 • Phone 373-7599 Ext 86645 • Email: andre@cs.auckland.ac.nz • Office Hours: Wednesday 2:30pm - 3:30pm (or email for appointment)

•Paul Ralph • Office: Computer Science Building (Bldg 303S) Room 492 on Level 4 • Phone 373-7599 Ext 88867 • Email: p.ralph@auckland.ac.nz • Office Hours: Open Door Policy - visit anytime or email for appointment

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Teaching Staff

•Ann Cameron (Lab Supervisor/ Course Coordinator) – Office: Computer Science Building (Bldg 303S) Room 479 – Email: ann@cs.auckland.ac.nz – Office Hours: Open door policy (or email for appointment) – See Ann if there are any problems

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Computer Science Support Group

•See http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/for/currentstudents/advisersandsupport/

•Ann Cameron •Angela Chang •Adriana Ferraro •Paul Denny •Radu Nicolescu •Andrew Luxton-Reilly

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Contents

•Introduction – Hardware, Digital Information, Software

•Internet – WWW, Email, – Forums, Blog, Wiki – Social networking – Risks, Social and Legal Issues, File Sharing

•Home / Office Applications and Publication Tools – Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Databases – HTML, PowerPoint/Presentations, LaTeX

•Programming – Python

•Special Topics – History, Artificial Intelligence, Digital Game Design

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Course Requirements •Required reading

– Course reference manual (selected topics), available online from the Resources page of the CompSci111 website:

•https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/courses/compsci111s2c/resources/CompSci111ReferenceManual.pdf

•Lab manual is required (available from University Book Shop) – Online resources (slides, web links) on course website:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/courses/compsci111s2c

•Assessment – Labs 20% Practical – Test 20% Theory – Exam 60% Theory

•Must pass both practical and theory (≥50% each). •Lab attendance is compulsory.

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Laboratories

•Overview – Designed to provide practical experience – Prepare for labs by reading the lab manual, lecture overheads and online sources – Friendly atmosphere. Talk to other students.

•Assessment

– 1 compulsory three hour lab each week (start in the second week of semester) – 9 labs, worth 20% of final mark – 10% of each lab for attendance (be there on time at the beginning) – Must hand in your lab assignment before the start of the following lab

•Location

– First Floor Teaching Laboratory (FTL), Room 175, Building 303

•Bring your lab manual, student ID card and a USB stick (flash drive) to labs. A cheap one is fine. •Remember: you need ≥50% of practical part to pass the course.

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Study

• Time management – 10 hours per week.

• 3 hours lectures • One 3 hour lab • 4 hours reading

• Internet resources – http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/courses/compsci111s2c – http://en.wikipedia.org/

• Getting started – Get 2015 S2 lab manual from UBS (has a pink cover) – Log into a computer, read your email (when emailing staff, use your university email account)

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Who wants to be class representative?

•

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Hardware

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Server Farm

•

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Design of a Personal Computer

•

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Input

Output

Processing

Stor

age

Introduction to Hardware

•Computer Hardware – “Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer (not advised)

are called hardware” – Modular

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Monitor

Keyboard

Mouse

System Unit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_hardware

Inside the System Unit

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Modular Components Power Supply CD Drives Cooling Fans CPU Motherboard Hard Drives Expansion Cards

Inside a Laptop

•Cooling fans •CPU •Motherboard •Flash drive •Expansion cards* •RAM •Power Supply (batteries)

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*Not really cards but graphics and IO chips http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Retina+Display+Mid+2012+Teardown/9462/1

Hitting MacBook with hammer

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Power Supply

•Converts AC to lower DC voltage

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Motherboard

•Main circuit board for the computer – Everything else connects to the motherboard

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Processor

• CPU (Central Processing Unit) – "Brain" – Follows instructions

• Speed – Computation speed often measured in

operations per second (OPS) – Clock speed (Hz) is the speed with which

electrical signals pass through the CPU – The faster the better, except ...

• Cooling – ... heat is one of the major limitations – The faster the CPU the hotter it gets – CPU must be kept cool – Cooling fan, Heat sink, Water cooled

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Processor

• CPU (Central Processing Unit) – "Brain" – Follows instructions

• Speed – Computation speed often measured in

operations per second (OPS) – Clock speed (Hz) is the speed with which

electrical signals pass through the CPU – The faster the better, except ...

• Cooling – ... heat is one of the major limitations – The faster the CPU the hotter it gets – CPU must be kept cool – Cooling fan, Heat sink, Water cooled

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Moore’s Law (1965)

•In 3 Years – Potentially 4 times the work

in the same time

•In 15 years – 1,000 times as powerful

•In 30 years – 1,000,000 times as powerful

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Gordon E. Moore (co-founder of Intel)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

The number of transistors on a single integrated circuit doubles approximately every 18 months, while the price remains the same. (Originally Moore said “every 2 years”.)

Transistors on Chip under electron microscope

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Clock Speed of CPUs

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Speed CPU 1 MHz 6502 (Apple II 1977) 4 MHz 8088 (IBM XT 1981) 16 MHz 80286 (IBM AT) 66-100 MHz 80486 (1989) 75 - 166 MHz Intel Pentium / AMD K5 (1993) 166 - 233 MHz Intel Pentium MMX 200 - 450 MHz Intel Pentium II / AMD K6 400MHz - 1 GHz Intel Pentium III / AMD Athlon 1 – 3.4 GHz Intel Pentium 4 / AMD Athlon XP(2000) 1.6 - 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 (2010) 3.7-4.4 GHz IBM POWER7+

Other criteria for quality

•Power efficiency and heat are just as important as processor speed.

•Processors have several cores now. Commonly from 2 to 8.

•Examples of other processors: ARM, a family of instruction set architectures for computer processors based on reduced instruction set computing (RISC). Used in mobile devices. COMPSCI 111 / 111G

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Wirth’s Law

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

“Software gets slower more rapidly than

hardware gets faster.”

Niklaus Wirth, 1995

Memory

•Random Access Memory (RAM) –Primary memory, main memory –Data is lost when electricity switched off –Size of the RAM is most important –Speed also important (dependent on

motherboard) –To access memory takes from 10 to 150

nanoseconds depending on hardware (SRAM faster than DRAM)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_access_memory

Memory Capacity

•Measured in bytes •Plain Text (approx.)

– 1 byte 1 character - using ASCII standard for encoding – 1 KB 13 lines/1000 characters in our course notes – 1 MB 300 pages – 1 GB 175 phone books

•Music (approx.) – 1 GB 2 hours

•DVD (approx.) – 1 GB 20 minutes

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"640K ought to be enough for anybody.“ Bill Gates in 1981

Expansion Cards

•Circuit board that provides additional functionality – Sound Card – Graphics Card – Network Card – RAID controller

•Depending on the Motherboard - these may be included on the board itself. •Plugs into the Motherboard using standard slots

– ISA – PCI – AGP – PCI-Express

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_card

Graphics Card

•Converts the internal representation of an image into something that can be displayed using a computer monitor

–3D Graphics Card (also does 2D, of course) Some makers: –Nvidia (invented GPU’s) –AMD (bought ATI in 2006) –Intel (makes them as part of CPU)

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Nvidia GeForce GTX 780

Secondary Storage

• Mass Storage – Long-term storage – Persistent – Much slower to access than RAM – Much cheaper than RAM

• Devices – Hard Disk (HDD) – Solid-State Drive (SSD) – Flash drives – Magnetic Tape

• Optical Devices – CD – DVD (read with red laser, 8GB) – Blu-ray Drive (blue laser, up to 50GB)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive

The incredible shrinking memory

•According to Wikipedia all of the data stored here, on punchcards in 1959, can fit in a 4GB USB flash drive.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive

=

RAID

Bottleneck of performance on many systems is the secondary storage • Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (or Redundant Array of Independent

Disk). Many small disks are cheaper than one big disk, and also faster. • Read and write in parallel • Write additional information to prevent loss of data • Fast, cheap and reliable

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Data RAID Controller

Hard Disk 01

Hard Disk 02

Hard Disk 03

RAID variations

• RAID 0 – data stripes (increase speed) • RAID 1 – data redundancy (increase reliability)

• RAID 1 + 0 (RAID 10) combines both

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Solid State Drives

• Another approach to speed up access to data on storage devices is to remove the moving parts. • Solid State devices are purely electronic with no moving parts. • They are still more expensive per GB stored than magnetic disk drives. • USB flash drives are small solid state drives. • They interface to the computer in the same way as magnetic drives (but there are some

differences in the way the operating system handles them).

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

Mainframe Computers

• They are used by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing. Need to be reliable, because they are used for things like banking, airline reservations.

• Modern mainframes can run multiple different instances of operating systems at the same time. This technique of virtual machines allows applications to run as if they were on physically distinct computers.

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An IBM 704 mainframe (1964)

Modern IBM System z9 mainframe

IBM Mainframes (source: IBM)

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Supercomputer

• A computer at the frontline of contemporary processing capacity – particularly the amount of calculation.

• Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science. They are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks, such as weather forecasting and physical simulations.

• They use many microprocessors in parallel. The Tianhe-2 has 80,000.

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The Blue Gene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Lab: • over 250,000 processors, using normal data center air

conditioning • grouped in 72 racks/cabinets connected by a high-speed

optical network

Supercomputer Race

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Speed is measured in peta-flops (flops= floating point operations per second)

Input Devices

• A machine that feeds data from a user into a computer

– Keyboard • Typewriter (QWERTY / DVORAK) • Keypad

– Pointing Device • Mouse, Trackball, Touch Screen (now

multitouch) • Digitizing Tablet, Digital Pen

– Direct Entry • Scanner • Webcam, Microphone • Bar code reader

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More Human Computer Interfaces

• Voice recognition • Automated Telephone Systems • Voice tags for phone numbers, and other commands • Siri

• Biometric scanners (fingerprint, retina, iris, face, body) • US border control • Some laptops have them • Biometric passports (contactless RFID)

• Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags • Small chips that respond to a signal, and send back ID data • Used in university swipe cards • In the USA:

• Scheme to voluntarily implant RFID with medical info • School uses RFID to track students’ attendance

• Soon also in products, grocery shopping bags? • Problem: we do not want everybody to read our RFID chips • Suggested solution: RFID chips are shielded or destroyed after use

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Output Devices

• A machine that takes information processed by a computer and presents it in a form that a human can understand

• Screen – Cathode-Ray Tube (CRT) (rare now)

– Flat-Panel display (LCD, Plasma)

– Projector

– Head-mounted

• Printer – Inkjet, Laser

• Speakers • Touch based

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"A printer consists of three main parts: the case, the jammed paper tray and the blinking red

light"

Connectors and Buses • Universal Serial Bus (USB)

– Used for almost everything • Version 1 is slow ( ~1.5MB/s) • Version 2 is fast (~60 MB/s) • Version 3 is very fast (~570 MB/s)

– Many devices can be connected with hubs

• PS/2 connector – Used for mouse & keyboard

• Firewire – Used for video cameras, HDs – High-speed (~60-100MB/s)

• Video Graphics Array (VGA) connector – Used only for monitors

• Digital Visual Interface (DVI) – Used for LCD monitors or projectors – Transmits video data digitally (better quality)

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Understanding Advertisements

• Specifications

– CPU type

– CPU number of cores

– Size of RAM

– Size of HDD

– Size/Type of Monitor

– Other drives (DVD, Blu-ray)

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