Welcome to week 2 of CS 5220! The class is now at 114 students, representing a wide array of disciplines and backgrounds. Only 75 of you have submitted HW0; for those who have not submitted, please do submit! Note that we’re using CMS for just this homework so that there’s no issues with linking netids to GitHub IDs for those of you who value your privacy.
We are continuing work on the class cluster, and the issues with home directories should at this point be resolved. If you are still having trouble accessing your home directory, please email me. When you do log into the cluster, you can get access to a standard set of tools with the command
module load cs5220
This gets you up-to-date versions of several utilities, as well as
the Intel compiler toolchain. The actual contents of the cs5220
module may change a bit as we continue to get things set up.
Narrated notes for Tuesday’s lecture on architecture basics are up in three parts. Thursday’s notes are in process, though not up yet. I think I’ll be able to get the lecture notes up faster in the future – much of the time spent on the class this past week has been spent on administrative stuff (like installing software on the cluster) that I hope will not take so much time as we get into the semester. Colin and I felt like the Etherpad worked out well last week, but I was probably talking too much; I hope you’ll try to take the time to look at the slides (and exercises) before class, and we’ll try to make the actual class time a little more interactive. Again, bring your laptops if you have them (and bring a pad of paper as well).
As a point of clarification, I would ideally like the lecture responses to be submitted via one GitHub pull request that lasts for the full semester. We’ll close the requests at the end of the semester. Please name the pull request “HW: blah” (where “blah” is whatever title you feel is most appropriate).
Also as a point of clarification: the demo repository that I
referred to last week (and the membench repository that I refer
to this week) are ordinary repositories on GitHub. If you would
like to build the software from these repositories on the totient
cluster, I recommend using git clone to clone the repository
to your totient home directory. You can then pull updates via
git pull origin.
If you’re still confused by the whole business of using Git, Colin has put up a post about it; also, see the readings page for recommended background reading on the topic.