B
Hardware Basics
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine just by power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.” Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.
(From “AI Koans”, a collection of jokes popular at MIT in the 1980s).
B.1 Introduction (and a Puzzle)
You cannot program a multiprocessor effectively unless you know what a multiprocessor is. You can do a pretty good job of programming a uniprocessor without understanding much about computer architecture, but the same is not true of multiprocessors. We will illustrate this point by a puzzle. We will consider two programs that are logically ...
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