Course Review and Final Exam Preview

Generally, the things we've covered in this second half of the course fall into two categories:

• How things work (raising consciousness)
• Floating Point Assembly
• ARM Assembly Language
• Talking to the OS with Syscalls
• Signals
• Embedded Systems
• How to make things work faster (raising performance)
• Timing Code & Performance Programming
• Bits, and Bitwise Operators
• SIMD: Single Instruction, Multiple Data in SSE
• SSE for High Performance
• Threads and Multicore
• Cache Performance
• GPU programming in CUDA

These all interact in a nearly dense graph: for example, when two threads share the same cache line, there is a large performance cost.  You can use bitwise operations to simulate branching in SSE.  GPU performance is similar to the performance gain from both threads and SIMD.  I've had to use bitwise tricks to improve performance on slow embedded systems.  

For the exam, you're expected to not only know this information, but know how it interrelates!

1. CS 301 Practice Final Exam

0.) NAME: ___________________________ (Score: 2 points!)
(From 2011). Closed book; closed notes. Complete sentences NOT needed.

1.) Which C++ data types can benefit from SSE? ___________________________________________

What do SSE's "ps" instructions, like "addps" do? ______________________________________

Why would you choose a “ps” over an “ss” instruction? ____________________________________

(Score: 9 points.)

2.) Given four floats sitting in memory at pointers "a", "b", "c", and "d", please write the x86 assembly code to compute “a*b+c*d”. You can leave this value in SSE register xmm0.

(Score: 10 points. Hint: movss, addss, and mulss.)

3.) What's inside an IEEE 32-bit float? Draw at least three parts, and label each part's name, and size in bits.

(Score: 10 points)

4.) What will this function return? x = ____________________

float funky(void) {

float x=2;

for (int i=0;i<10;i++) x=x*x;

return x; 

}

And why? ______________________

(Score: 5 points)

5.) If this code returned integer zero, then how fast is “doStuff”? _____________________________ seconds

int start=time_in_seconds();

doStuff();

return time_in_seconds()-start;

(Score: 5 points)

6.) Critique these false statements about performance analysis.

(Score: 15 points.)

7.) A coworker is amazed to discover that adding threads makes their code slower, not faster!  Why might this be?

(Score: 10 points.)

8.) Which instruction do you use for x86 system calls? _________________

Why might you make a bare system call? __________

(Score: 5 points.)

9.) Here's some over-optimized C++ code. Rewrite it in sane C++ with no bitwise operators.

(Score: 10 points.)

10.) For threads, when might you prefer to use std::thread over OpenMP threads?

(Score: 5 points.)

11.) Compared to x86, which of these is the “same” or “different” (and how?) on ARM and GPU?

(Score: 12 points. If they're different, briefly tell me how they're different.)

CS 301 Lecture Note, 2014, Dr. Orion Lawlor, UAF Computer Science Department.