TDDD56 Multicore and GPU Programming (6 ECTS)
Autumn2 2023
Mid-Term Evaluation with Muddy Cards
The (new) course TDDD56 has been mid-term evaluated with the muddy card method in the eighth lecture on monday 14 november 2011. About 40 students attended the lecture, and I received 31 cards.
In contrast to my well-established courses where the muddy cards typically expose balanced comments about a widely scattered set of issues, the evaluation of the muddy card comments for this first instance of TDDD56 clearly revealed a major issue with the new (CPU) labs, in particular with the report writing requirements and the resulting time effort.
As an immediate remedy to this problem in the running course instance, we have decided about the following simplifications for the remaining CPU labs (labs 2 and 3):
- Report writing for labs 2 and 3 is no longer required,
demonstration and explanation of the solution is sufficient.
See the revised lab instructions for further details.
The requirements for lab 1 remain unchanged.
(If you already have handed in a report for lab 2, it will be corrected, but we do not require you to submit a revision.) - The lab 3 question to imagine and explain another scenario of the ABA problem has been removed, demonstrating one ABA occurrence will be fine.
- As a clarification: There is no requirement to use the provided scripts for generating the performance plots asked for. Feel free to use other tools if you prefer.
- The deadline for the CPU labs has been extended to friday 25/11.
We hope that these simplifications make the remaining work with lab 2 and lab 3 a bit easier for you so you can better enjoy the remainder of the course.
Apart from these CPU lab issues, the course seems to run quite well. The lectures and slide material receive mostly good or very good comments, and the course contents is appreciated as interesting, relevant and modern.
Some cards point at a very heterogeneous audience. For instance, some feel that
they are lacking technical prerequisites from previous courses,
some dislike programming and would prefer more theory,
while a few others complain about overlap with TDDC78 or repetition from the OS course.
Note that a certain overlap with TDDC78 is unavoidable (and had
been announced in the beginning) because we do not require students to take both
TDDC78 and TDDD56 or, if so, in one specific order. Also, it seems that the
repetition of thread programming concepts was well appreciated by others.
For next year, the thread programming lecture should be flagged as optional, too.
Issues that were only raised once are not taken up here.
Thanks for all comments!
Christoph Kessler, examinator TDDD56
Page responsible: Christoph W Kessler
Last updated: 2011-11-16