M1 Final Exam Reviewer (CS0051)

The growing difficulty of building larger, more complex software systems

Software crisis

A way to hide low-level details so programming becomes easier

Abstraction

The ability of a program to run on different systems with little or no change

Portability

The ease of updating. fixing, and improving software

Maintainability

Multiple tasks overlapping in time through fast switching

Concurrency

Multiple tasks actually running at the same time on multiple CPUs

Parallelism

Tasks are executed one after another with no overlap

Sequential computing

The ability of a system to improve performance when more resources are added

Scalability

Extra work that does not directly contribute to the main computation

Overhead

The speedup of a program is limited by its sequential parts

Amdahl's law

An instance of a running program with its own separate memory space

Process

The unit of execution inside a process

Thread

Single instruction, single data; a uniprocessor model

SISD

Single instruction, multiple data; one instruction works on many data items.

SIMD

Multiple instructions, single data; different instructions act on the same data

MISD

Multiple instructions, multiple data; many tasks run independently

MIMD

A MIMD system where processors share one global memory

Shared-memory MIMD

A MIMD system where each processor has local memory

Distributed-memory MIMD