Pre-Interview Details

  • Firstly we were given three choices under which we wish to pursue our MS by Research - Theory, Computing Systems, Intelligent Systems.
  • A 3 hour(yes u read it right) subjective test was conducted(2nd May) where we had to answer questions from within our panel. Since I had selected Computing Systems I can speak only for that. I dont exactly remember the questions but most of them were from the resources provided before hand by them (lectures of faculty members @ IITB).
  • The standard of questions were a bit higher than that of GATE but if we are conceptually sound one should be able to tackle it.
  • The results were declared 3 days(5th May) later and my interview was the next day first slot.( I was on top of the list!)

The Interview

It happened on Google Meet, though there were only four person joined in, but one of it was a conference room where multiple professors were listening. My interview lasted close to 45 mins and it was intense!

Firstly they started with introduce yourself and why MS?
I said I’m comfortable in OS/Architecture and so they started the grilling.

  • Who invokes a scheduler?
  • Does OS need support for sync for itself?
  • What is paging?
  • Array address is?
  • Find page id from the above address?
  • Where is page table stored and how to access it?
  • What is the use of PT if we are accessing memory so many times?
  • Discussion on TLB and physical caches?
  • PIVT/VIPT/ which is suitable
  • Adding TLB’s to pipeline, what is effect? i-cache & d-cache
  • Suppose after adding TLB no effect in perf only number of stage increases? Why we need it then?
  • Effect of branch instructions and discussion on branch predictors
  • Infinite resources, discuss the scenario of how will u execute n instructions?
  • Time complexity of above, ignore loops/function calls.
  • Can we run all n parallel? Data hazards discussion.
  • Few questions to identify types of languages, were simple but it was a rapid fire round
  • Why we use stack, how will you store function calls, is return address saved on PC?
  • Any issue we can have with stack - stack overflow
  • You have 3 files .o, .h and shared library how will these be compiled.
  • Static/Dynamic linking and loader
  • Where will preprocessor be used, and how will macros be handled?

Few thoughts

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