INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTING SCIENCE

(Course Code: CSC 107)

Department of Computer Science

Department of Computer Science

Mewar International University Nigeria

Instructor: Ali Abdullahi

Email: [email protected]
Phone: +2348060408946
Definitions
Computer: A computer is basically defined as a tool or machine used for processing
data to give required information. It is capable of:
 taking input data through the keyboard (input unit),
 storing the input data in a diskette, hard disk or other medium,
 processing it in the central processing unit (CPU) and
 giving out the result (output) on the screen or the Visual Display Unit (VDU)

Data Processing Information

A Diagram to define a computer

Data: The term data refers to facts about a person, object or place, e.g. name, age,
complexion, school, class, height etc.
Information: This is referred to as processed data or meaningful statement, e.g. net pay
of workers, examination results of students, list of successful candidates in an
examination or interview etc.
Methods of Data Processing
The following are the three major methods that have been widely used for data
processing over the years:

 The Manual method,

 The Mechanical method and
 The Computer method.
The Manual Method
The manual method of data processing involves the use of chalk, wall, pen, pencil and the
like. These devices, machines or tools facilitate human efforts in recording, classifying,
manipulating, sorting and presenting data or information. The manual data processing
operations entail considerable manual efforts. Thus, the manual method is cumbersome,
tiresome, boring, frustrating and time consuming. Furthermore, the processing of data by
the manual method is likely to be affected by human errors. When there are errors, then the
reliability, accuracy, neatness, tidiness, and validity of the data would be in doubt. The
manual method does not allow for the processing of large volumes of data on a regular and
timely basis.
The Mechanical Method
The mechanical method of data processing involves the use of machines such as the
typewriter, roneo machines, adding machines and the like. These machines facilitate
human efforts in recording, classifying, manipulating, sorting and presenting data or
information. The mechanical operations are basically routine in nature. There is virtually
no creative thinking. Mechanical operations are noisy, hazardous, error prone and untidy.
The mechanical method does not allow for the processing of large volumes of data
continuously and timely.

The Computer Method

The computer method of carrying out data processing has the following major features:
1) Data can be steadily and continuously processed
2) The operations are practically not noisy
3) There is a store where data and instructions can be stored
4) temporarily and permanent.
5) Errors can be easily and neatly corrected.
6) Output reports are usually very neat, decent and can be produced
7) in various forms such as adding graphs, diagrams and pictures etc.
8) Accuracy and reliability are highly enhanced
9) Below are further attributes of a computer which make an
10) indispensable tool for humans.

Characteristics of a Computer
1) Speed: The computer can manipulate large data at incredible speed and response
time can be very fast.
2) Accuracy: Its accuracy is very high and its consistency can be relied upon. Errors
committed in computing are mostly due to human rather than technological
weakness. There are in-built error detecting schemes in the computer.
3) Storage: It has both internal and external storage facilities for holding data and
instructions. This capacity varies from one machine to the other. Memories are built
up in K (Kilo) modules where K=1024 memory locations.
4) Automatic: Once a program is in the computer’s memory, it can run automatically
each time it is opened. The individual has little or no instruction to give again.
5) Reliability: Being a machine, a computer does not suffer human qualities of
tiredness and lack of concentration. It will perform the last job with the same speed
and accuracy as the first job every time even if ten million jobs are involved.
 6) Flexibility: It can perform any type of task once it can be reduced to logical steps.
Modern computers can be used to perform a variety of functions like on-line
processing, multiprogramming, real time processing etc.

The Computing System

The computing system is made up of the computer system, the user and the environment
in which the computer is operated.

The Computer System

The computer system is made up of the hardware and the software.

The Hardware
The computer hardware comprises the input unit, the processing unit and the output unit.
The input unit comprises those media through which data is fed into the computer.
Examples include the keyboard, mouse, joystick, trackball and scanner.
The processing unit is made up of the Arithmetic and Logic Unit (ALU), the control unit
and the main memory. The main memory also known as the primary memory is made up
of the Read Only Memory (ROM) and the Random Access Memory (RAM).
The output unit is made up of those media through which data, instructions for processing
the data (program), and the result of the processing operation are displayed for the user to
see. Examples of the output unit are the monitor (Visual Display Unit) and the printer.

Software
Computer software is the series of instructions that enable the computer to perform a task
or group of tasks. A program is made up of a group of instructions to perform a task. Series
of programs linked together make up software. Computer programs could be categorized
into system software, utility software, and application programs.

Computer Users
Computer users are the different categories of personnel that operate the computer. We
have expert users and casual users. The expert users could be further categorised into
computer engineers, computer programmers and computer operators.

The Computing Environment

The computing environment includes the building housing the other elements of the
computing system namely the computer and the users, the furniture, auxiliary devices such
as the voltage stabiliser, the Uninterruptible Power Supply System (UPS), the fans, the air
condition
The Diagram of the computing system is presented in

The Computing System

Hardware software User Computing

Environment

Other Diagram

A Brief History of Computer Technology

A complete history of computing would include a multitude of diverse devices such as the
ancient Chinese abacus, the Jacquard loom (1805) and Charles Babbage’s “analytical
engine” (1834). It would also include a discussion of mechanical, analog and digital
computing architectures. As late as the 1960s, mechanical devices, such as the Merchant
calculator, still found widespread application in science and engineering. During the early
days of electronic computing devices, there was much discussion about the relative merits
of analog vs. digital computers. In fact, as late as the 1960s, analog computers were
routinely used to solve systems of finite difference equations arising in oil reservoir
modeling. In the end, digital computing devices proved to have the power, economics and
scalability necessary to deal with large scale computations. Digital computers now
dominate the computing world in all areas ranging from the hand calculator to the
supercomputer and are pervasive throughout society. Therefore, this brief sketch of the
development of scientific computing is limited to the area of digital, electronic computers.
The evolution of digital computing is often divided into generations. Each generation is
characterised by dramatic improvements over the previous generation in the technology
used to build computers, the internal organisation of computer systems, and programming
languages. Although not usually associated with computer generations, there has been a
steady improvement in algorithms, including algorithms used in computational science.
The following history has been organised using these widely recognized generations as
mileposts.
(1) First Generation Electronic Computers (1937 – 1953)
Three machines have been promoted at various times as the first electronic computers.
These machines used electronic switches, in the form of vacuum tubes, instead of
electromechanical relays. In principle the electronic switches were more reliable, since they
would have no moving parts that would wear out, but technology was still new at that time
and the tubes were comparable to relays in reliability. Electronic components had one
major benefit, however: they could “open” and “close” about 1,000 times faster than
mechanical switches.
The earliest attempt to build an electronic computer was by J. V. Atanasoff, a professor of
physics and mathematics at Iowa State, in 1937. Atanasoff set out to build a machine that
would help his graduate students solve systems of partial differential equations. By 1941,
he and graduate student Clifford Berry had succeeded in building a machine that could
solve 29 simultaneous equations with 29 unknowns. However, the machine was not
programmable, and was more of an electronic calculator.
A second early electronic machine was Colossus, designed by Alan Turning for the British
military in 1943. This machine played an important role in breaking codes used by the
German army in World War II. Turning’s main contribution to the field of computer
science was the idea of the Turning Machine, a mathematical formalism widely used in the
study of computable functions. The existence of Colossus was kept secret until long after
the war ended, and the credit due to Turning and his colleagues for designing one of the
first working electronic computers was slow in coming.
The first general purposes programmable electronic computer was the Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), built by J. Presper Eckert and John V.
Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania. Work began in 1943, funded by the Army
Ordinance Department, which needed a way to compute ballistics during World War II.
The machine wasn’t completed until 1945, but then it was used extensively for calculations
during the design of the hydrogen bomb. By the time it was decommissioned in 1955 it had
been used for research on the design of wind tunnels, random number generators, and
weather prediction. Eckert, Mauchly, and John Von Neumann, a consultant to the ENIAC
project, began work on a new machine before ENIAC was finished. The main contribution
of EDVAC, their new project, was the notion of a stored program.
There is some controversy over who deserves the credit for this idea, but no one knows
how important the idea was to the future of general purpose computers. ENIAC was
controlled by a set of external switches and dials; to change the program required
physically altering the settings on these controls. These controls also limited the speed of
the internal electronic operations. Through the use of a memory that was large enough to
hold both instructions and data, and using the program stored in memory to control the
order of arithmetic operations, EDVAC was able to run orders of magnitude faster than
ENIAC. By storing instructions in the same medium as data, designers could concentrate
on improving the internal structure of the machine without worrying about matching it to
the speed of an external control.
Regardless of who deserves the credit for the stored program idea, the EDVAC project is
significant as an example of the power of interdisciplinary projects that characterise
modern computational science. By recognising that functions, in the form of a sequence of
instructions for a computer, can be encoded as numbers, the EDVAC group knew the
instructions could be stored in the computer’s memory along with numerical data. The
notion of using numbers to represent functions was a key step used by Goedel in his
incompleteness theorem in 1937, work which Von Neumann, as a logician, was quite
familiar with. Von Neumann’s background in logic, combined with Eckert and
Mauchly’s electrical engineering skills, formed a very powerful interdisciplinary team.
Software technology during this period was very primitive. The first programs were written
out in machine code, i.e. programmers directly wrote down the numbers that corresponded
to the instructions they wanted to store in memory. By the 1950s programmers were using
a symbolic notation, known as assembly language, then hand-translating the symbolic
notation into machine code. Later programs known as assemblers performed the translation
task.
As primitive as they were, these first electronic machines were quite useful in applied
science and engineering. Atanasoff estimated that it would take eight hours to solve a set
of equations with eight unknowns using a Marchant calculator, and 381 hours to solve 29
equations for 29 unknowns. The Atanasoff-Berry computer was able to complete the task
in under an hour. The first problem run on the ENIAC, a numerical simulation used in the
design of the hydrogen bomb, required 20 seconds, as opposed to forty hours using
mechanical calculators. Eckert and Mauchly later developed what was arguably the first
commercially successful computer, the UNIVAC; in 1952, 45 minutes after the polls
closed and with 7% of the vote counted, UNIVAC predicted Eisenhower would defeat
Stevenson with 438 electoral votes (he ended up with 442).
(2) Second Generation (1954 – 1962)
The second generation saw several important developments at all levels of computer
system design, from the technology used to build the basic circuits to the programming
languages used to write scientific applications.
Electronic switches in this era were based on discrete diode and transistor technology with
a switching time of approximately 0.3 microseconds. The first machines to be built with
this technology include TRADIC at Bell Laboratories in 1954 and TX-0 at MIT’s Lincoln
Laboratory. Memory technology was based on magnetic cores which could be accessed in
random order, as opposed to mercury delay lines, in which data was stored as an acoustic
wave that passed sequentially through the medium and could be accessed only when the
data moved by the I/O interface.
Important innovations in computer architecture included index registers for controlling
loops and floating point units for calculations based on real numbers. Prior to this accessing
successive elements in an array was quite tedious and often involved writing self-
modifying codes (programs which modified themselves as they ran; at the time viewed as
a powerful application of the principle that programs and data were fundamentally the
same, this practice is now frowned upon as extremely hard to debug and is impossible in
most high level languages). Floating point operations were performed by libraries of
software routines in early computers, but were done in hardware in second generation
machines.
During this second generation many high level programming languages were introduced,
including FORTRAN (1956), ALGOL (1958), and COBOL (1959). Important commercial
machines of this era include the IBM 704 and 7094. The latter introduced I/O processors
for better throughput between I/O devices and main memory.
The second generation also saw the first two supercomputers designed specifically for
numeric processing in scientific applications. The term “supercomputer” is generally
reserved for a machine that is an order of magnitude more powerful than other machines
of its era. Two machines of the 1950s deserve this title. The Livermore Atomic Research
Computer (LARC) and the IBM 7030 (aka Stretch) were early examples of machines that
overlapped memory operations with processor operations and had primitive forms of
parallel processing.
(3) Third Generation (1963 – 1972)
The third generation brought huge gains in computational power. Innovations in this era
include the use of integrated circuits, or ICs (semiconductor devices with several transistors
built into one physical component), semiconductor memories starting to be used instead of
magnetic cores, microprogramming as a technique for efficiently designing complex
processors, the coming of age of pipelining and other forms of parallel processing, and the
introduction of operating systems and time-sharing.
The first ICs were based on small-scale integration (SSI) circuits, which had around 10
devices per circuit (or “chip”), and evolved to the use of medium-scale integrated (MSI)
circuits, which had up to 100 devices per chip. Multilayered printed circuits were
developed and core memory was replaced by faster, solid state memories. Computer
designers began to take advantage of parallelism by using multiple functional units,
overlapping CPU and I/O operations, and pipelining (internal parallelism) in both the
instruction stream and the data stream. In 1964, Seymour Cray developed the CDC 6600,
which was the first architecture to use functional parallelism. By using 10 separate
functional units that could operate simultaneously and 32 independent memory banks, the
CDC 6600 was able to attain a computation rate of 1 million floating point operations per
second (1 Mflops). Five years later CDC released the 7600, also developed by Seymour
Cray. The CDC 7600, with its pipelined functional units, is considered to be the first vector
processor and was capable of executing at 10 Mflops. The IBM 360/91, released during
the same period, was roughly twice as fast as the CDC 6600. It employed instruction look
ahead, separate floating point and integer functional units and pipelined instruction stream.
The IBM 360-195 was comparable to the CDC 7600, deriving much of its performance
from a very fast cache memory. The SOLOMON computer, developed by Westinghouse
Corporation, and the ILLIAC IV, jointly developed by Burroughs, the Department of
Defence and the University of Illinois, was representative of the first parallel computers.
The Texas Instrument Advanced Scientific Computer (TI-ASC) and the STAR-100 of
CDC were pipelined vector processors that demonstrated the viability of that design and
set the standards for subsequent vector processors.
Early in this third generation, Cambridge and the University of London cooperated in the
development of CPL (Combined Programming Language, 1963). CPL was, according to
its authors, an attempt to capture only the important features of the complicated and
sophisticated ALGOL. However, the ALGOL CPL was large with many features that were
hard to learn. In an attempt at further simplification, Martin Richards of Cambridge
developed a subset of CPL called BCPL (Basic Computer Programming Language, 1967).
(4) Fourth Generation (1972 – 1984)
The next generation of computer systems saw the use of large scale integration (LSI –1000
devices per chip) and very large scale integration (VLSI –100,000 devices per chip) in the
construction of computing elements. At this scale entire processors will fit onto a single
chip, and for simple systems the entire computer (processor, main memory, and I/O
controllers) can fit on one chip. Gate delays dropped to about Ins per gate.
Semiconductor memories replaced core memories as the main memory in most systems;
until this time the use of semiconductor memory in most systems was limited to registers
and cache. During this period, high speed vector processors, such as the CRAY 1, CRAY
X-MP and CYBER 205 dominated the high performance computing scene. Computers
with large main memory, such as the CRAY 2, began to emerge. A variety of parallel
architectures began to appear; however, during this period the parallel computing efforts
were of a mostly experimental nature and most computational science was carried out on
vector processors. Microcomputers and workstations were introduced and saw wide use as
alternatives to time-shared mainframe computers.
Developments in software include very high level languages such as FP (functional
programming) and Prolog (programming in logic). These languages tend to use a
declarative programming style as opposed to the imperative style of Pascal, C. FORTRAN,
et al. In a declarative style, a programmer gives a mathematical specification of what should
be computed, leaving many details of how it should be computed to the compiler and/or
runtime system. These languages are not yet in wide use, but are very promising as
notations for programs that will run on massively parallel computers (systems with over
1,000 processors). Compilers for established languages started to use sophisticated
optimisation techniques to improve codes, and compilers for vector processors were able
to vectorise simple loops (turn loops into single instructions that would initiate an operation
over an entire vector).
Two important events marked the early part of the third generation: the development of the
C programming language and the UNIX operating system, both at Bell Labs. In 1972,
Dennis Ritchie, seeking to meet the design goals of CPL and generalise Thompson’s B,
developed the C language. Thompson and Ritchie then used C to write a version of UNIX
for the DEC PDP-11. This C-based UNIX was soon ported to many different computers,
relieving users from having to learn a new operating system each time they change
computer hardware. UNIX or a derivative of UNIX is now a de facto standard on virtually
every computer system.
An important event in the development of computational science was the publication of the
Lax report. In 1982, the US Department of Defence (DOD) and National Science
Foundation (NSF) sponsored a panel on Large Scale Computing in Science and
Engineering, chaired by Peter D. Lax. The Lax Report stated that aggressive and focused
foreign initiatives in high performance computing, especially in Japan, were in sharp
contrast to the absence of coordinated national attention in the United States. The report
noted that university researchers had inadequate access to high performance computers.
One of the first and most visible of the responses to the Lax report was the establishment
of the NSF supercomputing centres. Phase I on this NSF program was designed to
encourage the use of high performance computing at American universities by making
cycles and training on three (and later six) existing supercomputers immediately available.
Following this Phase I stage, in 1984 – 1985 the NSF provided funding for the
establishment of five Phase II supercomputing centres.
The Phase II centres, located in San Diego (San Diego Supercomputing Centre); Illinois
(National Centre for Supercomputing Applications); Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center); Cornell (Cornell Theory Centre); and Princeton (John Von
Neumann Centre), have been extremely successful at providing computing time on
supercomputers to the academic community. In addition they have provided many valuable
training programs and have developed several software packages that are available free of
charge. These Phase II centres continue to augment the substantial high performance
computing efforts at the National Laboratories, especially the Department of Energy
(DOE) and NASA sites.
(5) Fifth Generation (1984 – 1990)
The development of the next generation of computer systems is characterised mainly by
the acceptance of parallel processing. Until this time, parallelism was limited to pipelining
and vector processing, or at most to a few processors sharing jobs. The fifth generation saw
the introduction of machines with hundreds of processors that could all be working on
different parts of a single program. The scale of integration in semiconductors continued
at an incredible pace, so that by 1990 it was possible to build chips with a million
components – and semiconductor memories became standard on all computers.
Other new developments were the widespread use of computer networks and the increasing
use of single-user workstations. Prior to 1985, large scale parallel processing was viewed
as a research goal, but two systems introduced around this time are typical of the first
commercial products to be based on parallel processing. The Sequent Balance 8000
connected up to 20 processors to a single shared memory module (but each processor had
its own local cache). The machine was designed to compete with the DEC VAX-780 as a
general purpose Unix system, with each processor working on a different user’s job.
However, Sequent provided a library of subroutines that would allow programmers to write
programs that would use more than one processor, and the machine was widely used to
explore parallel algorithms and programming techniques.
The Intel iPSC-1, nicknamed “the hypercube”, took a different approach. Instead of using
one memory module, Intel connected each processor to its own memory and used a network
interface to connect processors. This distributed memory architecture meant memory was
no longer a bottleneck and large systems (using more processors) could be built. The largest
iPSC-1 had 128 processors. Toward the end of this period, a third type of parallel processor
was introduced to the market. In this style of machine, known as a data-parallel or SIMD,
there are several thousand very simple processors. All processors work under the direction
of a single control unit; i.e. if the control unit says “add a to b” then all processors find their
local copy of a and add it to their local copy of b. Machines in this class include the
Connection Machine from Thinking Machines, Inc., and the MP-1 from MasPar, Inc.
Scientific computing in this period was still dominated by vector processing. Most
manufacturers of vector processors introduced parallel models, but there were very few
(two to eight) processors in these parallel machines. In the area of computer networking,
both wide area network (WAN) and local area network (LAN) technology developed at a
rapid pace, stimulating a transition from the traditional mainframe computing environment
towards a distributed computing environment in which each user has their own workstation
for relatively simple tasks (editing and compiling programs, reading mail) but sharing
large, expensive resources such as file servers and supercomputers. RISC technology (a
style of internal organisation of the CPU) and plummeting costs for RAM brought
tremendous gains in computational power of relatively low cost workstations and servers.
This period also saw a marked increase in both the quality and quantity of scientific
visualisation.
(6) Sixth Generation (1990 to date)
Transitions between generations in computer technology are hard to define, especially as
they are taking place. Some changes, such as the switch from vacuum tubes to transistors,
are immediately apparent as fundamental changes, but others are clear only in retrospect.
Many of the developments in computer systems since 1990 reflect gradual improvements
over established systems, and thus it is hard to claim they represent a transition to a new
“generation”, but other developments will prove to be significant changes.
In this section, we offer some assessments about recent developments and current trends
that we think will have a significant impact on computational science.
This generation is beginning with many gains in parallel computing, both in the hardware
area and in improved understanding of how to develop algorithms to exploit diverse,
massively parallel architectures. Parallel systems now compete with vector processors in
terms of total computing power and, most especially, parallel systems to dominate the
future.
Combinations of parallel/vector architectures are well established, and one corporation
(Fujitsu) has announced plans to build a system with over 200 of its high and vector
processors. Manufacturers have set themselves the goal of achieving teraflops (1012
arithmetic operations per second) performance by the middle of the decade, and it is clear
this will be obtained only by a system with a thousand processors or more. Workstation
technology has continued to improve, with processor designs now using a combination of
RISC, pipelining, and parallel processing. As a result it is now possible to procure a desktop
workstation that has the same overall computing power (100 megaflops) as fourth
generation supercomputers. This development has sparked an interest in heterogeneous
computing: a program started on one workstation can find idle workstations elsewhere in
the local network to run parallel subtasks.
One of the most dramatic changes in the sixth generation is the explosive growth of wide
area networking. Network bandwidth has expanded tremendously in the last few years and
will continue to improve for the next several years. T1 transmission rates are now standard
for regional networks, and the national “backbone” that interconnects regional networks
uses T3. Networking technology is becoming more widespread than its original strong base
in universities and government laboratories as it is rapidly finding application in K-12
education, community networks and private industry. A little over a decade after the
warning voiced in the Lax report, the future of a strong computational science
infrastructure is bright.
CONCLUSION