TDDE65 mid-term evaluation 2026

The course has been mid-term-evaluated by the muddy card method on 29/4/2026 during the 10th lecture.
8 students attended the lecture, and 5 cards were received. Due to the low amount of answers, no statistical conclusions can be drawn. I summarize in the following the general outcome and comment where appropriate.

Overall, the course seems to run well.

Lectures are generally appreciated, which is expressed on several cards. One card explicitly appreciates the introduction to multithreading (I guess this refers to Lab 0 and preparatory slides, which was newly introduced this year to better support non-CS students in the course) but expresses concerns about too many concepts and API features covered in the course.

Labs are appreciated, too (well designed, fun, good supervision resources). One card asks for additional information about expected behaviour in the lab instructions (Comment: We will clarify that in a future version of the lab documentation for the next instance of the course), and one complains about having to hand in a report for the miniproject. One card finds it cumbersome to allocate Sigma resources, compile and run on Sigma resources. Comment: This is how HPC resources are generally used, and it is part of the course experience.

One cards ask for more introductory information about Slurm and the lab environment. Please note that we do have detailed instructions for that, given both in the NSC guest lecture, in the introductory lab lesson, and in the Sigma quick reference sheet posted on the course web page and distributed in the first lab session. Not all of this is also printed in the lab compendium, which indeed focuses on the problems to be solved, but overall there is comprehensive documentation available. If you still find any concrete unclear points in the available documentation, please let us know.

As a concrete update based on our observations in recent lab sessions, we recommend not to use interactive shells. It has happened that some students could not execute their programs on our reservation due to others generously allocating resources to interactive sessions.

Thanks for all comments and suggestions!

Christoph Kessler, course leader TDDE65

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Last updated: 2026-05-06