Lecture 1

Learning objectives

After this class, you should be able to:

1. Describe the course objectives in general terms.
2. Describe your responsibilities regarding: following deadlines and instructions, participation, group work, and reading assignments.
3. Explain course policies regarding attendance, missed exams, late assignment, an "I" grade, and professional ethics.
4. Give reasons for the recent trend toward multicore processors.

Reading assignment

1. Read the syllabus on blackboard.
2. Review material on computer architecture. In particular, read about the role of caches and the memory hierarchy.

Exercises and review questions

• Exercises and review questions on current lecture's material
  1. Obtain CS and FSU computer accounts, if you do not have them already.
  2. Access the class website using blackboard.
  3. Access the discussion board for this course, and check any messages there. You may also post messages there.
  4. What will your grade be if you get 88% overall in the course, but 75% in the exams?
  5. Post, on the discussion forum, any study techniques that you have found effective.
  6. Consider the following hypothetical situation.

     You are given a programming assignment, with the objective of testing your ability to implement a parallel minimum spanning tree algorithm. You find that a similar homework had been given in a class at a different university earlier, and a solution too has been posted. You download that assignment, modify it, and submit it.

     Discuss whether this is ethical or not under the following two situations: (i) you cite the original source, and mention that you are making a modification, and (ii) you do not cite the original source. Will permission from the original code developer affect your conclusions on whether or not it is ethical?

     Now consider a slightly different situation. Assume that implementing a parallel minimum spanning tree algorithm is not an objective of the assignment, but you used someone else's minimum spanning tree code as a part of your solution. However, you demonstrated your skill in the objective being tested through your own work. Discuss the ethical issues under this scenario.

     You may post your arguments on the discussion forum for lectures.

  7. Draw a graph, plotting clock speeds of different processors against the year in which that processor was first available. Historically, at what rate have clock speeds increased? How have they increased in recent years? How have the number of transistors increased historically and how have they increased in recent years?

• Preparation for the next lecture
  1. Read /proc/cpuinfo to find out the type of processor used on the linprog machine. Then, find out the following information for that processor. How many levels of caches does it have? How are caches at different levels shared between the cores?
  2. How many cores will the Intel Nehalem EX processor have?

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Last modified: 31 Dec 2009