Beschreibung:
Computer Science: The Hardware, Software and Heart of It focuses on the deeper aspects of the two recognized subdivisions of Computer Science, Software and Hardware. These subdivisions are shown to be closely interrelated as a result of the stored-program concept. Computer Science: The Hardware, Software and Heart of It includes certain classical theoretical computer science topics such as Unsolvability (e.g. the halting problem) and Undecidability (e.g. Godel's incompleteness theorem) that treat problems that exist under the Church-Turing thesis of computation. These problem topics explain inherent limits lying at the heart of software, and in effect define boundaries beyond which computer science professionals cannot go beyond. Newer topics such as Cloud Computing are also covered in this book. After a survey of traditional programming languages (e.g. Fortran and C++), a new kind of computer Programming for parallel/distributed computing is presented using the message-passing paradigm which is at the heart of large clusters of computers. This leads to descriptions of current hardware platforms for large-scale computing, such as clusters of as many as one thousand which are the new generation of supercomputers. This also leads to a consideration of future quantum computers and a possible escape from the Church-Turing thesis to a new computation paradigm.
Introduction.- Computation: A Brief History Prior to 1900.- The Heart of Computer Science.- The Software of Computer Science, Computer Programming from Fortran to C++.- The Hardware of Computer Science.- Operating Systems.- Computer Networks.- High Performance Computing and Communication (HPCC).- Programming for Distributed Computing.- Databases.- Computer Security: Cryptographic Methods, Public Key Cryptography, RSA, ECC.- Complexity Theory.- Multi-variate (Parameterized) Complexity.- Quantum Computing.- Numerical Thinking in Algorithm Design and Analysis.- Fuzzy Logic and Computer Science.- Statistics of the Field.