ANNA UNIVERSITY EXAMINATION MAY/JUNE 2012 IMPORTANT QUESTIONS CS2354 -ADVANCED COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE Unit I 1.What is instruction-level parallelism?

Explain in details about the various dependences caused in ILP? 2.Explain in details about static branch prediction and dynamic branch prediction 3.Explain the techniques to overcome data hazards with dynamic scheduling? 4. Explain in detail the hardware based speculation for a MIPS processor Unit II 5.Explain in detail how compiler support can be used to increase the amount of parallelism that can be exploited in a program. 6.Explain the limitations of ILP? 7.Explain Intel IA-64 Architecture in detail with suitable reference to Itanium processor 8. Explain how hardware supports for exposing more parallelism at compile time? Unit III 9.Explain in detail the symmetric shared memory architectures and explain the cache coherence problem in detail 10. Explain in detail the distributed shared memory architecture highlighting the directory based cache coherence protocol. Substantiate your explanation with suitable examples and state diagrams 11. Define synchronization and explain the different mechanisms employed for synchronization among processors? Unit IV 12. Discuss in detail the different levels of RAID 13. How does one reduce cache miss penalty and miss rate? Explain. 14. Discuss Reliability, Availability and Dependability for storage devices in detail 15. What are the ways available to measure the I/O performance? Explain each of them in detail. 16. Discuss in detail about type of storage devices UNIT V 17 Explain in detail about CMP architecture and SMT architecture? 18 Explain in detail about IBM Cell Processor 19 Discuss about Intel multi-core architecture. 20 Explain in detail about software and hardware multithreading techniques?