Paper 2 Module 1 Flashcards
What is Thinking Abstractly?
The process of thinking abstractly involves ignoring the insignificant details of a particular system or problem and focusing on the information that is cruitial for problem solving.
What is Thinking Ahead?
It is the considersation of :-
- What are the inputs and outputs?
- Are there any preconditions?
- What are the reusable components?
e.g :- Subroutines, Libraries, classes.
What is thinking ahead - caching?
When data is cached, a temporary copy is stored so that it can be accessed again faster (that from its original source). The ability to cache and reuse previously fetched resources is an essenctial technique in optimising system performance.
What is thinking procedurally?
Procedural thinking involves breaking down a problem into a series of steps or sequeunce of actions (procedures) that can be used to solve the problem.
What is Procedural Abstraction?
Procedural abstraction means using a procedure to carry out a sequence of steps for achieving some task.
What is thinking logically?
identify the key points in this program where a decision has to be taken.
What is thinking concurrently?
It is the process of completing more than one task at any given time. This can be done by both concurrent processing and parallel processing.
What is concurrent processing?
It takes place when more than several processes are running with each in turn being given a slice of processor time. It gives the appearance that several processes are happening at the same time but only one processor is used.
What is parallel computing?
Requires multiple processors each executing different instructions simultaneously with the goal of speeding up computations. It is impossible on a single processor.
Characteristics of concurrent processing.
- the number of tasks completed in a given time is increased.
- Less time is wasted by the processor being idle as another task is carried out.
- if a lot of users are trying to run programs, this might take a lot of computation which makes the tasks longer to complete.
- some resources could Deadlock where two processes are trying to access the same resource.
What are characteristics of parallel processing?
- Enables several tasks to be performed simultaneously by different processors. Speeds up processing particularly for repetitive calculation on large data set.
- Graphics which requires a lot of calculations can be generated faster.
- Limitations linked to overheads in coordinating the processors and some tasks may run faster with a single processor. (not programmed to run parallel processing).
