CIS 5930: Fundamentals of High Performance Optimization

• 85% programming projects, including final project/presentation
• 10% written/oral quizzes,
• 5% class participation
• No written final

If I feel that students are not fully engaged by the programming projects, I will put more emphasis on written testing:

• 60% programming projects, including final project
• 35% written exams, including final exam
• 5% class participation

Students with disabilities:
If you have a physical, psychological, medical or learning disability that may impact on your ability to carry out assigned course work, I would urge that you contact the Student Disability Resource Center (SDRC), 97 Woodward Avenue South, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4167, (850) 644-9566 (voice), (850) 644-8504 (TDD) , E-mail:sdrc@admin.fsu.edu. Kindly bring a letter to me from the SDRC indicating your need for academic accommodations within the first week of class. The syllabus and other class materials can be made available in alternative format upon request.

Academic Integrity:
Remember that the goal of programming or written assignments is to enhance your programming skills and understanding of the topics under discussion. Indulging in academic dishonesty defeats this as well as being unfair to other students. In case you have any questions about whether an act of collaboration may be construed as academic dishonesty, please clarify the issue with the instructor before you collaborate. All students are expected to follow the FSU Academic Honor Code. Academic dishonesty can result in a grade of 'F'.

• It is understandable that discussing a problem with other people may lead to more insight into the issues involved. Thus discussing a problem in assignments/homeworks with other people is fine. However, discussing the solutions to the problem is NOT acceptable.
• Every student must write his/her own code and homework. Showing your code or homework to members of other teams, giving it to them, or making it accessible to them (e.g., by making the files world-readable) is academic dishonesty.
• You are responsible for ensuring that your code/documentation/results are adequately protected and not accessible to other teams. Change permissions of your working directory to 0700 ('chmod 0700 <directory>).
• Consulting code from a textbook, or from the Internet, in order to understand specific aspects of your assignment is fine. However, copying entire code or large parts of such code will be considered academic dishonesty. If you borrow small parts of code from these sources, you must acknowledge this in your submission and additionally you must clearly understand and be able to explain how the code works.

The programming assignments are designed to help you understand how to achieve high performance in the real world. You will be able to see the effects of optimization immediately, and will find that formerly abstract concepts come into much greater focus (and are a good deal more enjoyable in implementation) when their application results in noticable speedups on real-world kernels. This more concrete understanding should allow you to more fully grasp principles of critical importance in architecture, compilers, and high performance computing.

Finally, there is quite a bit of fun in just making things run fast. This is the modern day equivalent of learning how to soup up your family sedan so that it can run at 350 MPH: only a very few people actually need to do it, but it sure is neat. If you've ever wanted to sneer at the local gentoo linux user as "doing the best an uninformed noobie can hope for, I guess", then this is certainly the class for you.

• Course main page.
• ATLAS assembly page.
• ATLAS architecture page.
• High-speed Cryptography": Course currently being taught on similar topics.