CMPUT 399: Computational Science and Clusters

Paul Lu
Department of Computing Science
January 2008

Assignment 1: Applications in Computational Science

Due Date: Tuesday, January 29, 2008, in class

Description:

This assignment is to be done individually and is worth 12.5% of your mark in the course.

NOTE: Some edits down below on Jan. 31/08, for "next time" CMPUT 399 is offered. The purpose of the assignment is for you to learn more about one application area in which high-performance computing (HPC) (including clusters) is used. In contrast, the next assignment will be about tools and this one is about applications.

There are three parts to this assignment: reading, summarizing, and presenting.

1. Reading: Choose any significant problem or application in computational science. Some suggestions are given below, but you can discuss other possibilities (in advance) with the instructor.

   Find between 1 and 3 substantial articles on your chosen topic. The best articles include research papers (from academic conferences and journals; see list at end of Course Outline) and articles from science-oriented magazines such as Scientific American.

   Read and understand your articles. NOTE: You will have to hand in copies of your articles to the instructor.

2. Summarizing: Write a 3-page report (1 inch margins, at least 12 point font, single-spaced) on the topic and articles that you have chosen. Use your own words and analysis to synthesize the ideas from the article(s) such as to answer 3 main questions:
   1. What is the main scientific problem being solved? Why is this problem important to science?
   2. What is the main computational technique used in helping to solve the problem (e.g., data processing, simulation)?
   3. In what way is the problem and computational technique well-suited to clusters, or not? Is a different hardware/software architecture (e.g., large shared-memory parallel computers) better suited? Why?

   Be sure to use proper citation and referencing techniques (any academic style of citation is acceptable). Be aware of the Code of Student Behaviour and it how applies to referencing source material.

3. Presenting: Based on your report, prepare a presentation of approximately 5 to 10 slides (e.g., PowerPoint, Keynote, PDF, or any other appropriate format). Your presentation should also answer (obviously, in abbreviated form) the same 3 main questions as your report.

   You will be presenting your slides in class, at a time to be arranged.

What to hand in:

Also, hand in copies of the articles that you used.

Marking:

The assignment is worth 12.5% of your final mark in the course. This is an individual assignment. Do not work in groups. You may discuss the assignment with other students, but the report and presentation must be your individual work.

70% of the marks will be for the report. 30% of the marks will be for the presentation slides. No marks are allocated for the class presentation, but the class presentation will still be required.

Suggestions and Hints:

1. Web pages found by Google and Wikipedia are good places to start searching for information. But, they are not reliable enough (by themselves), so seek out actual papers or articles.
2. Suggestions for topics: More to come...
   1. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project in particle physics. The roots of the grid computing movement are in the computational needs of the LHC, and related projects such as ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS).
   2. Seismic data processing. Oil companies search for new oil reserves using seismic techniques and the data must be processed.

General comments on assignments:

1. Be careful of reading only one paper or one point of view on a topic. The assignment only requires one paper (otherwise, it might be too much work), but good scholarship requires that (ideally) you consider some other points of view.

   For example, some topics in computing science suffer from the ''school of thought'' problem; that is, if you ''believe'' in an idea, then all the papers that you write might uncritically repeat the accepted point of view, but there might be critics of the point of view with valid things to say.

2. In formal writing, such as this assignment or a report to your boss, be careful to not use contractions (e.g., that's, can't, doesn't) and do not use overly colloquial words or phrases (e.g., huge chunk, deal breaker, new kid on the block).
3. Be careful of making statements that you cannot support with evidence. Your statement might be right. The instructor might have even said it in class. But, unless you can make the argument with the support of facts, or cite a paper or the lecture notes, then it is risky to make such statements.
4. Be sure to pick papers with good technical content. Some Wikipedia articles and articles from newspapers or even industry magazines can be sorely lacking in technical content. For this course, always try to find a good academic paper for at least one of your sources.
5. Be sure to answer all 3 questions (Q1, Q2, Q3 in my comments) asked of you.
6. For your presentation slides, be very selective and exercise editorial control: Do not use too many slides, and make sure the content-to-words ratio is high for each slide. Edit, summarize, and condense.