CS414 Operating Systems - Homework 1

General Instructions. You are expected to work alone on this assignment.

Due Due: Tues Jan 29, 10am. No late assignments will be accepted.

Submit your solution using CMS. Prepare your solution using Word (.doc) or some ascii editor (.txt), as follows:


  1. Does a skyscraper (as they are traditionally built, used, and financed in the US) have the potential to exhibit incommensurate scaling? If so, describe what dimension or dimensions become the bottleneck and why.

  2. For a modern "high end" laptop of your choosing, give its make and model, a URL for its hardware specifications, and extract from those specifications a list of its hardware performance characteristics, including: number of processors, processor speed, cache size(s), main memory size, disk size, disk access time (seek latency and transfer speed), display resolution, and network speed(s). What performance dimension is most likely to be radically different 5 years hence, leading to significant OS implementation changes?

  3. Explain the difference between a peer-to-peer and a client-server distributed system.