1 Description

Imagine you have a computer system, and attached to the system bus is a secondary bus for specialized hardware. This project is about creating a simulation of the interaction between these devices on the secondary bus. The secondary bus will have connected to it a specialized RAM storage device that is used as a buffer, a specialized I/O module, and a specialized transfer device that can move data between the I/O module to buffer. The computer system will instruct the transfer device to transfer a certain amount of data, and will print the results to the screen.

The computer system, transfer device, buffer device, and I/O modules will all be simulated with their own program. The secondary bus will be simulated with pipes and a program to manage the multiple devices. This means you will need to write a total of five (5) programs. The entire project should be launched by running the computer system program giving it two arguments: the input file name, and the number of bytes to read and write to screen. As an example in java it might look like this on the command line:

java ComputerSystem exampleinput.txt 200

The computer system program should then launch the bus program, giving it the file- name as an argument, and connecting to its standard input and output via pipes. The bus program will then launch the other programs, giving the I/O module the file name, and connect to their standard input and outputs through pipes.

The computer system will then command the transfer module to transfer the number of bytes given on the command line to the buffer. Whenever the buffer is full, the transfer device will pause its transfer and the computer system will transfer those bytes from the buffer to itself, printing them to the screen. If the number of bytes to be read have not finished, the computer system sends the command to continue the transfer.

Once done, the computer system will send the command to quit to the bus program, that will send it to its children, causing the simulation to end.