Instructions


The course assigment is to port the provided coinporaal mining application to a GPU. You are expected to deliver a report on this assignment, which in combination with the final exam will determine the grade for this part of the course. Details on the assignment and the report can be found on the guideline page.

Apart from the assignment, we are organizing a small competition to see who can mine the most Coinporaals before the assignment deadline! Your grade will however not depend on your results in this competition! Only the report and final exam determine your grade. Of course this does not mean there is no reason to take part in the race for the most coinporaals. First of all if you do well in the competition, this a nice indication you are on the right track with the assigment. Furthermore, there is no extra work involved, so why not see if you can beat your fellow students in this friendly competition ;)

How to participate

The competition will start Wednesday December 7th in the afternoon. Please follow the instructions below to participate.

  1. Download the mining application
  2. Modify the application anyway you like. Note: the default application we provide already can mine coins without modification, it is just not very fast at it ;)
  3. After you modify the source, ensure your code still performs correct and is compatible with the competition framework. This can be done by running make check for a quick test or make benchmark for a full benchmark (see the application page for more details on this).
  4. Once you are certain your code is correct, place it in the production directory in your home folder on our servers.
  5. In the production folder, run make production once to prepare all the code.
  6. The competition software will automatically collect your sources from this folder, compile and run your application. After each run, a log is appended to the report.txt file in the production folder.

Notes:

  • You can already place your code in the production folder before the official start. It will just not be executed untill the start of the competition.
  • Everybody will be presented the same inputs to ensure fairness of the competition.

Competition Rules

  • You may speed up the application in any way you see fit using the available GPU in the system. The GPU on the development server matches the GPU on the competition server, so if you tune your code for the development server, performance on the competition server should be similar.
  • You may only use the production folder for the coinporaal mining application. I.e., do not put any other experiments in it, but use the development machine for that.
  • Cheating of any kind is of course disallowed. Use your own sense of judgement. If you have to think about whether something is allowed, it is probably cheating.

Violations of these rules will lead to exclusion of the competition. Based on the severity of the violation, additional measures may be taken.

Additional Information

If there are any unclarities or problems, we refer you to our forum on oncourse.

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