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ACAchap1questions

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11 views

ACAchap1questions

Uploaded by

Manikanta Sunkara
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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ACA_ Assignment 1

1.9 You are designing a system for a real-time application in which specific deadlines must be met.
Finishing the computation faster gains nothing. You find that your system can execute the
necessary code, in the worst case, twice as fast as necessary.
a. How much energy do you save if you execute at the current speed and turn off the system when
the computation is complete?
b. How much energy do you save if you set the voltage and frequency to be half as much?

1.10Server farms such as Google and Yahoo! provide enough compute capacity for the highest
request rate of the day. Imagine that most of the time these servers operate at only 60% capacity.
Assume further that the power does not scale linearly with the load; that is, when the servers are
operating at 60% capacity, they consume 90% of maximum power. The servers could be turned off,
but they would take too long to restart in response to more load. A new system has been proposed
that allows for a quick restart but requires 20% of the maximum power while in this “barely alive”
state.
a. How much power savings would be achieved by turning off 60% of the servers?
b. How much power savings would be achieved by placing 60% of the servers in the “barely alive”
state?
c. How much power savings would be achieved by reducing the voltage by 20% and frequency by
40%?
d. How much power savings would be achieved by placing 30% of the servers in the “barely alive”
state and 30% off?

1.11 Availability is the most important consideration for designing servers, followed closely by
scalability and throughput.
a. We have a single processor with a failures in time (FIT) of 100. What is the mean time to failure
(MTTF) for this system?
b. If it takes 1 day to get the system running again, what is the availability of the system?
c. Imagine that the government, to cut costs, is going to build a supercomputer out of inexpensive
computers rather than expensive, reliable computers. What is the MTTF for a system with 1000
processors? Assume that if one fails, they all fail.

1.15 Assume that we make an enhancement to a computer that improves some mode of execution
by a factor of 10. Enhanced mode is used 50% of the time, measured as a percentage of the
execution time when the enhanced mode is in use. Recall that Amdahl’s law depends on the fraction
of the original, unenhanced execution time that could make use of enhanced mode. Thus, we cannot
directly use this 50% measurement to compute speedup with Amdahl’s law.
a. What is the speedup we have obtained from fast mode?
b. What percentage of the original execution time has been converted to fast mode?

1.17 Your company has just bought a new Intel Core i5 dual- core processor, and you have been
tasked with optimizing your software for this processor. You will run two applications on this dual
core, but the resource requirements are not equal. The first application requires 80% of the
resources, and the other only 20% of the resources. Assume that when you parallelize a portion of
the program, the speedup for that portion is 2.
a. Given that 40% of the first application is parallelizable, how much speedup would you achieve
with that application if run in isolation?
b. Given that 99% of the second application is parallelizable, how much speedup would this
application observe if run in isolation?
c. Given that 40% of the first application is parallelizable, how much overall system speedup would
you observe if you parallelized it?
d. Given that 99% of the second application is parallelizable, how much overall system speedup
would you observe if you parallelized it?

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