CPSC 441, Fall 2004
Information about the Third TestThe third test in this course will be given during the scheduled final examination period for this course, on Wednesday morning, December 15. However, we have decided that the exam will begin at 10:00 AM, instead of at the scheduled 8:30 AM. The paper for your final project (if you are doing one) can be turned in at the exam or during my office hours later on Wednesday.
The exam will be four pages long. One page will be a 25-to-30 point essay question that will ask you to discuss the general idea of layered network protocols and also the five specific protocol layers that are used in the Internet. The other three pages will concentrate on material that we have covered since the second test. Although there might be a few questions on the most important ideas from earlier in the course, you will not be asked for details about, for example, the HTTP protocol, the TCP congestion control algorithm, or the contents of the IP packet header.
One of the topics for the test is MPI. You will not have to memorize the parameters of each MPI functions. If there are any questions that require you to use these functions, a parameter specification will be provided. The other new topic for this exam is Chapter 5 from the textbook, covering the Link Layer. The reading from this chapter was Sections 5.1, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6, although we did not cover all the topics in these sections. The labs covered on this test are labs 9, 10, and 11.
My office hours for next week include:
Monday, December 13: 11:00 -- 12:00 Tuesday, December 14: 11:00 -- 3:00 Wednesday, December 15: 12:00 -- 4:00Following are some terms and ideas that you should be familiar with from the new material. This is in addition to the most important material from Test 1 and Test 2.
The link layer Parallel and distributed processing Frames Shared memory parallel processing NIC (Network Interface Card) Distributed memory processing Shared medium vs. point-to-point Message passing Multiple access protocol Network topologies Approaches to multiple access: static (such as ring, mesh, hypercube) channel partitioning (TDM, FDM, CDMA) switched (such as switched Ethernet) taking turns (token ring) Beowulf random access (Ethernet, wireless) console/master node CSMA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access) dedicated compute nodes CSMA/CD (CSMA with Collision Detection) nodes connected by a private network -- used in Ethernet Network of workstations Ethernet MPI (Message-Passing Interface) collision domain MPI virtual machine Ethernet's response to a collision Process_count in MPI exponential backoff Rank of a process format of Ethernet addresses MPI messages assignment of Ethernet addresses MPI_Send Ethernet frame MPI_Recv CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) Collective communication MPI_Reduce Hubs MPI_Scatter Link-layer switches MPI_Gather Collision domains in hubs vs. in switches Communication overhead MAC address Load balancing ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) Master/slave design ARP requests and responses Embarrassingly parallel problems