Extreme Computing
Extreme Computing is about making the most of a computing cluster, be it processing huge data sets or serving high-volume websites. The course covers high-performance computing at several levels of the stack:
- Motivation:
- Big data problems, the memory hierarchy, latency requirements, performance considerations, and economics
- Algorithms:
- Processing large amounts of data, sharding, streaming, query processing, and randomised algorithms
- Infrastucture:
- Distributed file systems, fault tolerance, replication, job scheduling, and MapReduce/Hadoop
We aim to make students aware of topics using large (> 1000 node) clusters, but not be tied to particular vendors whereever possible. If you want to understand how companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter work, then this is the course for you.
Time
Lectures are Mondays and Thursdays 17:10-18:00 in Appleton Tower Lecture Theatre 4.
Labs start week 3.
Cluster
First, get inside informatics:
ssh student.ssh.inf.ed.ac.uk
Then log in:
ssh scutter$(seq -w 1 12 | shuf -n 1)
If this gives permission denied, make sure you're registered then wait 24 hours.
Who to Contact
- Piazza
- Almost Everything. Including all questions about the labs or assignments outside lab sessions.
- Informatics Teaching Organisation
- Assignment extensions
- Student portal
- Lab signup
- Computing Support
- Lab and cluster logins (DICE account)
- /dev/null
- Harsh marking
- Private Piazza
- Clear marker error (i.e. failed to add marks correctly, missed a solution). Marks can go up or down.
- Volker Seeker
- Marker error appeals. Include link to private Piazza post. Marks can go up or down.
Lecturer:
Kenneth Heafield
Lecturer:
Volker Seeker primary contact for students
Office: 1.21, Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street
E-mail: volker dot seeker at ed dot ac dot uk (but please use Piazza)
Prerequisites
Students should be familiar with the Unix command line and ssh. Information systems provides
a primer on the command line.
We do not require a particular programming language. Examples are mostly in Python and Java with occasional C++.
The is a Level-11 course, normally taken in Year 4. It is open
to all 4th year, MInf, and MSc students in Informatics.
We will expect you to know and apply algorithms and data structures, such as those taught in the Year 2 course Inf 2B.
Mailing List
Announcements regarding the course will be posted to the
course mailing list. All
students taking the course are automatically subscribed to this
list. Previous postings can be accessed using the
mailing
list archive.
