Projects Introduction

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Topics covered: Introduction

Instructor/speaker: Rodric Rabbah

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PROFESSOR: So today, we're going to have the final presentations from the student projects. So they did a lot of hard work. Some of them are still working upstairs and will come down just in time for presentation. So just a few slides on format and how the judging will happen-- so each team will have 15 minutes during which to tell about their little project and to give us a little demo. At least two PlayStation 3s will be set up by the end of the class. One will have audio. The other will have video and at least two teams will use them. The others will SSH in and show you their programs running on the PlayStation 3s that we have upstairs on the network.

One of the things that they'll be graded on or scored on is performance. Some of the things we'll do after class is performance profiling, to try to understand how much scalability you were able to achieve using parallel processor versus two versus three, all the way up to six. So what we'll do is we'll set up some time with the TAs to do the profiling after class. And you can update your source code up until 9:00 AM. So you'll show us how to do the profiling and then we can re-run that at 9:00 AM Saturday morning and give you updated scores to change your grades at the time of grades.

There are six scoring categories. Performance-- and this first Performance category is essentially what your performance metric is. You're going to define it, hopefully, and then you'll tell us how well you did. Project scope-- this is essentially a measure, because each of your different projects were different. You picked your own projects. We'll try to get an understanding for how much you tried to cover and what you actually did achieve. So we'll hopefully give us a good idea of that.

Completeness-- how robust is your code? How much you actually achieve relative to what you wanted to do? Are there data races? Is your code reproducible with every run? Presentation and Demo-- so we've decoupled it here, just because there are different ways people will be doing a demo. So you can sort of earn points in different categories. If you have a really good presentation but you might not be flashy, we'll take that into account. And then, Performance Scalability, which we'll do off and on. So each one of these categories score on a 10-point basis from one to 10, 10 being really good, and for a total of 60 points.

So for our judging panel, unfortunately, we couldn't get virtual Saman to really work, so Saman is with us on the phone. We have Michael Gordon and Bill [? Theeves, ?] two graduate students in Saman's group. We have myself, Professor Steve Ward from MIT, and Professor Weng Fai Wong, who's visiting from the National University of Singapore, doing a sabbatical year here.

Student presentations will dynamically reorder based on who's available and who's ready to go. This is a rough ordering that was picked randomly. So [? Pumuk is ?] here. He'll go first. And then, I see Linear Algebra Pack so they'll go after that. The Ray Tracing team is still in my office working, so we might have to bump them down. Soft Radio Team is here? Yep. Speech is here. Backgammon? Yeah. Those guys were ready having breakfast at 9:00. The seventh team, Molecular Dynamic Simulator-- unfortunately, they're not here. That team is not physically in Boston, so they'll present tomorrow morning but will not be considered as competitors in the competition.

There is a countdown clock. Bill is running his laptop. You can see it directly in front of you. It'll start at 15 minutes and every minute, it'll tick down, 14, 13, all the way down to zero. And you can go into negative times, but we'll start subtracting points. So the more you run over, the more points you start losing. So try to keep under the time limit.

What about questions?

If there are questions, we can take those after the presentation. If it's a short question-- yeah, let's leave all questions until after presentation today, unless there's something pressing. I'll try to moderate. So if we're ready to start, come up here.