Reference no: EM132232701

Question: Objective: Investigation of processes and the resources they use. Our focus is on multicore processors. Usage of ps an top. Preparation: We want to investigate the impact of running CPU and I/O intensive jobs on multi-core processors. For this use your own computer and only then the CS computers If you don't own a computer, you can use any other computer on campus (running linux). Write two small programs that contain loops and run for 5 minutes. The first program, called CPU-bound.c, should just perform simple arithmetic calculations, e.g. a counter. The second program, called IO-bound.c, should perform an I/O operation, e.g., open a file, write a character into the file and close it. Again, this should be done in a loop that will terminate after 5 minutes. Make sure the programs really terminate as we want to avoid having endless processes hogging resources! Read about top and ps and check out what information they provide, e.g., use the man pages to see what options are available.

Experiment 1: (using your computer)

1) Run top and see what processes the system is using. Try to understand what processes are running and interpret the information displayed for each process, i.e. interpret the columns.

2) Now start executing a single instance of your CPU-bound process in the background. Recall that a process can be executed in the background by using the "&", e.g. CPUbound &. Find out how to start a process, stop it, and start it again, run it in the foreground and send it to the background.

3) Next investigate the impact of the CPU-bound program using ps and top.

4) Now start the IO-bound in the background and again check using ps and top its impact. At this point you should have a single instance of both programs executing. What do you notice about the processes' CPU utilization?

5) Repeat the experiments with multiple instances of the processes:

1. Start multiple instances of your CPU-bound program to get the cores working.

a. What do you notice now about your CPU-bound processes?

b. How many instances of your CPU program did you run and what CPU utilization did you observe?

2. Start multiple instances of your UI-bound program.

a. What do you notice now about your mix of processes?

b. How many instances of your IO program should you (did you) run and what CPU utilization did you observe?

6) Once you are sure you can document your findings, kill the processes. How do you find out which processes you should kill? By now you should have figured out how to get the process ID (e.g., using top, ps) and use the man pages on the kill command.

IMPORTANT: Verify that you actually killed your programs!

Experiment 2: Do this only after you are done with Experiment 1, unless you do not own a computer. Gather the information from the experiment on the CS computers. Document differences between the two systems, i.e., did you observe any measurable differences between the CPU and I/O utilization between the target systems?

Deliverables: You need to turn in:

1) All source code of your programs in one tar file (via cscheckin). This means you should used the unix tar command, which will create the tar file called Ass1.tar. This tar file is what you need to turn in using cscheckin.

2) A hardcopy of 1) the assignment sheet as cover page, 2) your source code and 3) the report that shows and explains your findings, i.e. the impact of your executions and how they differ (or not) between the two target computers. Make sure you include screen shots of your programs in execution using ps and top. Your documentation should identify in the screen shots where the values of interest are, e.g., by highlighting, underlining. Make sure you clearly identify the support evidence! This report is the real delivery!

3) AGAIN: Use this assignment sheet as the cover-sheet for the hardcopy!