Syllabus
CMSC 818S:  Grid Computing

 

Primary Text (recommended)

• The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure (2nd Edition), Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier, 2004. 
  

Tentative Grading Plan

Your grade will be determined as follows:

	#	% total
Programming projects	2	35
Midterm	1	10
Final	1	25
Paper presentations	2	20
Class participation	-	10

 

Exams

• The final exam will be comprehensive.

• Mid-term may be take-home.

Programming projects

• A first project, in C or C++, using MPI to become familiar with parallel/distributed programming on a Linux cluster.  Accounts will be forthcoming.
  
• A second larger project, in C++ (or Java), implementing an application using DataCutter, on one or more Linux clusters.  This project will be done in teams of 2 people.
  
• The projects should be submitted by 6:00 pm on the day they are due. Late projects will be not be accepted.
  
• The instructor reserves the right to fail, regardless of overall numeric score, students who do not submit on-time a good faith attempt to complete the programming assignment.
  
• All submissions of assignments will be via email to me. Posted deadlines for program submission are sharp; standard Unix time of submission is used.
  

Intellectual Integrity, Academic Honesty, and Cheating

• The college policy on academic dishonesty is strictly followed.
  All graded materials (whether exams or programming assignments) must be strictly individual efforts.
  
• We expect you to follow all UMIACS and UMD guidelines for responsible machine usage.
  
• Dr. Sussman is the information owner for all Linux cluster accounts in this class, and all files in those accounts may be inspected by him at any time.
  
• Allowing another student not in your group to examine a listing of your program or examining the listing of another student's program (not in your group), for any reason, is strictly forbidden.
  
• Logging onto another student's account, for any reason, is cheating.
  
• Attempting to falsely represent the correctness of your program, or to delay other members of the class from completing a programming assignment, is cheating.
• The standard penalty for any cheating is to receive a grade of XF in the course. This grade denotes failure due to academic dishonesty, and your transcript will be so annotated.
  
• Automatic tools may be used to compare your solution to that of every other current or past student in this class, so it will be very difficult to hide any collaboration. The risk of getting caught is too high, and the standard penalty is way too high (grade of XF). In Spring 2003, multiple systems faculty members caught multiple students who thought they could hide their collaboration in CMSC 412.