Individual work tasks

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.