CS-343 Assignment 1

Read the background material for the course, and answer the following questions.

1. What is a petaflop?
2. If you know how long someting is in feet, how do you convert that to inches?
3. Use your previous answer to compute how many inches there are in 2.5 feet.
4. If you know how much time something takes in nanoseconds, how do you convert that to picoseconds?
5. Use your previous answer to compute how many picoseconds there are in 2.5 nanoseconds.
6. What is the period of a 4 GHz clock, in nanoseconds? In picoseconds? (Be sure to indicate which is which.)
7. What is the frequency of a sine wave with a 2.5 msec period? Be sure to indicate the unit of measure.
8. What is the period of a 44.0 KHz tone, in microseconds?
9. How many bits would it take to encode the days of the week? Write out a possible coding scheme for this.
10. What is a “binary search” and what does it have to do with digital codes?
11. How many bytes are there in 1 GB of main (RAM) memory? Answer as a base raised to an exponent.
12. How many bytes are there in 1 GB of disk (HDD) memory? Answer as a base raised to an exponent.

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