The hardware and software used in scientific computing has diversified over the past 30 years or so to become a very broad topic. We can cover only the basic elements it in this lecture series. If you find yourself doing a lot of computing on a particular architecture or within a particular software environment, it would be very useful to probe into the particular strengths or weaknesses of your tools.
bus, CPU, RAM/ROM, Disks, Cache
machine code, assembler, compiler, interpreter, packages
Help the computer, help yourself, help others!
You have been encouraged to keep a log book in your scientific laboratory classes. You will find that the habit of keeping a written record of your computer work will give you a valuable list of resources and techniques in the future, and also save you a lot of time.
integers, floating point, IEEE-754
does a+(b+c) = c+(a+b) ALWAYS?
C/C++ and FORTRAN77/90 store numbers in different ways.
Explore the conversion of internal representations to formatted output in C/C++ or FORTRAN77/90
Write (or find) small programs to explore underflow and overflow effects, and to try to demonstrate non-associative arithmetic.
Advanced students might wish to explore how far the SGi representation adheres to the IEEE-754 standard which is discussed extensively at this hyperreference.