Individual work tasks content part semester -1

 
 
 
3.
 
A COMPUTER SYSTEM
 
 
Exercise 1.
Read the text and supply it with the suitable title.
 
Mainframes take their beginning from the original computer and are used today 
in applications requiring substantial data processing and large memory capacity. 
These processors typically require room-size facilities. Mainframes support many 
peripheral devices and can drive several at a time, including printers, terminals, card 
readers, card punchers, tape drives, and disk drives. Memory is especially important 
since mainframes are used in data- intensive tasks such as financial operations. 
Originally, the only way to communicate with a computer was through punched cards, 
and thus mainframes still support reading and punching cards. As a result, mainframes 
are often used to provide processing power after a problem has been set up with the 
aid of a micro- or minicomputer. Moreover, mainframes are used to link together 
distributed smaller processors through-out an enterprise. And minicomputers can be 
tied directly into mainframes so users can access their large database. 
Supercomputers take advantage of the most recent advances in electronic 
circuits, processing techniques, and memory organization to reach computing speeds 
many times that of mainframes. Complex problems in CAD/CAM that were not even 
considered several years ago can now be solved economically. Applications of 
supercomputers include modelling and simulation tasks such as solid modelling, 
kinematics, analysis, and fluid-flow simulations. Another major application is a finite-
element analysis. Here, a supercomputer will perform the task three to ten times faster 
than a mainframe. Supercomputers work so much faster because of data pipelining, 
high-speed circuits, and large internal memories. In pipelining, data elements are 
streamed through the processor in blocks instead of being handled one-at-a-time as in 
conventional computers.