The First Component: Computer Systems

1
Chapter 13

• The First Component Computer Systems

2
The Computer Changed the World

• Huge variety of computers you will encounter
• Mainframes?
• Supercomputers?
• Advancement in computing
• Development of electronics to replace manual
  calculators
• Programs and data residing in computer memory
• More than 1 way to accomplish a task - different
  types of computers to solve similar problems

3
Types of Systems

• Mainframes
• Large, general purpose machines
• Process transactions and maintain vital data
• Proprietary hardware
• Represent heavy investments
• Process large amounts of data - critical
  transactions
• Supercomputers
• Speeds of teraflops - 1 trillion floating-point
  instructions per second
• parallel computing and vector technology
• Mini-computers
• RISC - reduced instruction set computing
• CISC - complex instruction set computing
• PCs
• Changing chip technology - toward multiple
  processors
• Reached limits of physics - chip design

4
Types of Systems

• Client server systems
• Network computers
• Massively parallel computers - multiple
  processors - coordinating execution of
  instructions - challenging
• Grid computing - connect clusters of computers
• PDAs
• Mobile computing
• Developing architecture for organizationdifficult
  - major study, considerable effort

5
Future Technology

• Predicting - risky
• Amazing chip - smaller, faster
• Servers - large and small - two approaches
• Blade server - series of small computers
• Large server - partition

6
Client Server Systems

• The quest for smaller and faster chips
• Large and small servers

7
Web Services

• Application - particular function - stove pipe
• ERP - connect functions
• Variety of software and programming techniques
  that foster integration between disparate
  applications
• Based on XML - extensible markup language - tags
  describe data - semantic information
• Components include
• Simple object access protocol (SOAP) - message
  envelope for sending - HTTP
• Universal description, discovery and integration
  (UDDI) - lets applications identify one another
• Web services description language (WSDL) - lets
  programs describe their capabilities

8
Trends

• The Semantic Web
• Attaching meaning to the contents of the Web -
  XML
• Moving software to the cloud
• Avoiding software ownership
• Seamless, transparent computing
• Ubiquitous computing - well hidden - dont
  recognize they are there
• A world wide computer
• Solve large problems - using idle computers over
  the Internet
• Monitoring and sensing - cheaper to fix before
  becomes worse
• New chip technology - molecular level computer
• Implications

9
Summary

• Changes in the technology force changes in
  hardware and software
• Efforts are underway to store content on the Web
  such that programs can interpret content meaning
• Trends to watch include ubiquitous computing and
  software distribution on the Internet