COMP1521 Notices

Final Exam

Posted by John Shepherd Tuesday 19 June 2018, 11:00:52 AM.

Reminder (as if you needed one) ... the COMP1521 Final Exam is on tomorrow (June 20).

Seating allocations are available. Check your timeslot (morning or afternoon) and your seat.
Note that afternoon people have a corralling room as an initial location.

All you need for the exam is a pen/pencil and your student card.

Mobile phones need to be switched off and put in your bag or away from your desk.
Similarly, smart watches and other "smart" devices.

Hint: rather than spending the day cramming facts into your head, which you'll probably forget by Thursday, you're better off practising MIPS and C programming, especially how to deal with bugs.

Get a good night's sleep and leave plenty of time to get to UNSW. Good luck.

17s2 Exam Solutions

Posted by John Shepherd Sunday 17 June 2018, 05:42:46 PM, last modified Sunday 17 June 2018, 05:43:28 PM.

I found my solutions to the 17s2 Final Exam

I can't find my solutions to the Sample Exam and don't have time to write any

Lab Marks and Exam Seating Allocation

Posted by John Shepherd Wednesday 06 June 2018, 04:09:55 PM.

I've computed the lab marks: 2 marks for each lab, except 4 marks for the week 11 one; grades converted to marks; summed all marks and added a small bonus for each "A+". Gives a total of up to 22. Then a little magic to turn this into a mark out 10.

Note: tutors were asked to enter all grades by now; if any grades were "?" (meaning: a submission, but no grade awarded), I assumed that you submitted but were to ashamed to demo your work, so gave minimum grade "D". If the truth is that your tutor has forgotten to enter the grades, get them to contact me and I'll fix the grades and adjust your labs mark.

Seating allocation for the Final Exam on 20 June is now available. If you forgot to fill in a preference and the session you were allocated doesn't work for you, let me know.

Pre-Exam Consultations

Posted by John Shepherd Friday 01 June 2018, 01:04:53 PM.

I'll be running pre-exam consultations from 2pm-3pm in K17-410 (my office) on the following days:

• Tue 5 June, Thu 7 June, Tue 12 June, Thu 14 June, Mon 18 June, Tue 19 June

The aim of these consultations is to clarify concepts from lectures, tutes, labs and assignments.

If your main reason for coming to a consultation is to try to find out what's on the exam, save your time, because I won't be telling you any more than I've already told you. Similarly, if you want to complain about a mark, send me email rather than coming to a consultation.

Copy of 17s2 Final Exam

Posted by John Shepherd Tuesday 29 May 2018, 11:48:45 AM.

I've added a copy of the 17s2 Final Exam under the Sample Exams link.

Don't bother trying to infer e.g. how many questions, relative difficulty of Programming Questions, etc. from this. The 18s1 Final Exam is written from scratch, without paying attention to what happened in 17s2 (except to avoid duplicate questions). I'll stop writing Theory Questions when I think there are enough to keep you occupied for 3 hours, so there may be 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or ... There are guaranteed to be three Programming Questions, though (1 MIPS, 2 C).

Final Exam Timeslots

Posted by John Shepherd Wednesday 23 May 2018, 10:27:46 AM, last modified Wednesday 23 May 2018, 10:37:36 AM.

A form is available for you to specify a preference for whether you want to take the COMP1521 Final Exam on June 20 in either the morning or the afternoon.

https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs1521/18s1/seating/final/register.cgi/

Some people (e.g. DSU students and those with another exam on the same day) have already been allocated timeslots. Everyone else can choose, or specify "no preference"; first-in gets the slot.

The form will close on Monday 4 June. If you haven't filled it out by then, we'll assume "no preference". The seating allocation will be available via this site by Monday 11 June.

Week 12 and Sample Exams

Posted by John Shepherd Sunday 20 May 2018, 05:33:10 PM, last modified Sunday 20 May 2018, 10:20:08 PM.

There will be tute/lab classes in Week 12. The tute will review last week's Practice Prac Exam (and it needs reviewing given that more than half the submissions didn't work), and preview the final exam. In the lab, we want you to fill out the MyExperience Evaluations (course,lecturer,tutor), and then clean up marking for any labs that you submitted close to the deadline, but haven't yet demo'd. Don't bother rushing out to do all those labs you didn't get around to; it's too late for them, but not too late for earlier labs that were submitted almost on time but haven't been graded.

There are also copies of last week's Practice Prac Exams and a Sample Final Exam under the Sample Exams link in the sidebar. I'll add the 17s2 Final Exam later in the week.

Weeks 11 and 12

Posted by John Shepherd Tuesday 15 May 2018, 11:52:18 AM, last modified Tuesday 15 May 2018, 11:53:42 AM.

In Week 11, as I'm sure you know, the labs are a Practice Prac Exam. Tutes are for revision and discussion on how to approach the Practice Prac Exam.

In Week 12, we'll have both tutes and labs. Tutes: review the course; review the Practice Prac Exam; discuss how you'll overcome problems in the Final Exam. Labs: cleaning up; ensure that all the labs you submitted are marked, do final demos, etc.

There won't be any COMP1521 classes in Week 13.

Consultations

Posted by John Shepherd Tuesday 08 May 2018, 08:40:47 PM.

I've got extra consultations this week: Wed 2-3, Thu 2-3, in K17-410.

Before you come along, try to fix your problems using gdb . You need to learn how to use it anyway, to save yourself from disasters in the final exam, so why not learn it now.

Remember also, that there are 430 of you and 1 of me. It's not possible to spend even 20 mins with everyone who needs help with the assignment.

Assignment 2 Testing

Posted by John Shepherd Monday 07 May 2018, 10:23:01 PM, last modified Tuesday 08 May 2018, 12:29:37 AM.

I've added a page for Assignment 2 Testing under Assignments.

Update: there clearly were some problems with the tests. I've done a new version (12:25am Tue 8 May). Hopefully no more problems, but let me know if there are.

A couple of important notes:

• The spec talks about MIN_CHUNK as a basis for deciding when to allocate the entire FREE chunk, but never states explicitly that there's a minimum allocatable chunk size. Since the sample output didn't do this, and since I'll bet most of you are working from the sample output, follow that.
• Be careful about sizeof( Type *) ... on the CSE machines, it's 4 ... on Macs (at least) it's 8 ... this affects the size values that you see in your output. All of the expected test outputs were run on a CSE machine.

Let me know if there are any problems with the sample data or expected outputs.

Lectures are Done

Posted by John Shepherd Thursday 03 May 2018, 09:54:38 PM.

In 17s2, we did 3 hours per week lectures over 12 weeks ... 36 hours of lectures.
In 18s1, we did 4 hours per week lectures over 9 weeks ... 36 hours of lectures.
Since we've covered all of the material, there will be no more lectures.

Tutes and Labs will, however, continue in Weeks 10 and 11. The Week 11 Lab is a Practice Prac Exam: 2 hours to solve a MIPS programming problem and a C programming problem, using the same environment that we'll be using in the final exam. It's worth twice as much as a regular lab, and contributes to your overall Lab mark.

The Week 09 Thursday 5-6 Lecture Video contains some important information about the final exam, so make sure you watch it sometime. (One of the slides has the wrong dates for exams ... forgot to fix them when copying from the 17s2 slides ... I've fixed them in the slides, but we're stuck with them in the video)

Over the next couple of weeks, we'll be adding more info to the web site, including the 17s2 exam.

Assignment 2 Updates (ii)

Posted by John Shepherd Friday 27 April 2018, 09:42:00 AM.

It turns out that I wasn't subscribed to the Comments on the Assignment 2 Spec page, so I wasn't getting notifications for the comments posted there. If I don't respond to a query within 24 hours, poke me with an email.

Thanks to some useful queries in the Comments, I've tightened up a couple of points in the spec, and changed test3.c to check whether myMalloc() was successful (ahem). The new test3.c is available in the assignment directory and I've included it in assign2.zip

Assignment 2 Updates

Posted by John Shepherd Tuesday 24 April 2018, 08:05:13 AM.

I've made a few minor tweaks to the supplied code and the spec, thanks to feedback from one of the tutors (Dylan). If you downloaded the code before 8am on Tue 24 April, you might want to get another download and compare.

If I make any more updates, I'll note them here.

Mini Prac Exam ... Week 9 > 11

Posted by John Shepherd Monday 23 April 2018, 09:33:28 PM.

Thanks to Anzac Day, I'm pushing the remaining tute/lab schedules around a little.

E.g. the Mini Prac Exam that was scheduled for the Week 09 labs will now happen in the Week 11 labs.

I've updated the Schedule in the Course Outline to reflect the changes.

Quiz 5

Posted by John Shepherd Monday 23 April 2018, 09:17:40 PM.

Quiz 5 is out now. Due before 11:59pm on Sunday (April 29).

Assignment 2 Available

Posted by John Shepherd Monday 23 April 2018, 08:55:18 PM.

The spec and supplied files for Assignment 2 are now available. There is also a lecture video from Monday which talks about the assignment. Please let me know of any problems ASAP.

The assignment is due on or before Sunday 13th May.

No tute/labs in Week 08

Posted by John Shepherd Sunday 22 April 2018, 10:30:37 AM.

Grrrrr. I hate public holidays. Apparently, I agreed to not have tute/lab classes in Week 08 to take account of the Anzac day holiday. I would have preferred to run them and have people with Wednesday classes distribute themselves to other classes (like we did in the Good Friday week). (hmmm ... sounds like a good poll question)

Since we haven't booked the rooms for Week 08, there will be no tute/labs this week.

L ectures will be running as usual (Mon 12-2, Thu 4-6 in Mathews A).

Extra Video for Week 07

Posted by John Shepherd Sunday 22 April 2018, 08:47:15 AM.

After the video recording mess in the Thursday lecture, I managed to salvage most of the material, except for the last 10 minutes. So, I made an extra video covering this, and the rest of material that I'd planned to do on Device Management. The Week 08 lectures will be all on Networks.

Webcms3 Mail Failure

Posted by John Shepherd Monday 16 April 2018, 10:38:03 PM.

Webcms3 hasn't been sending email when you post comments for the last couple of days, which is why I haven't been replying to your questions. Annoying.

Check'ing Assignment 1

Posted by John Shepherd Friday 13 April 2018, 03:37:16 PM.

The check script for Assignment 1 has a time limit to catch infinite loops. This will cause some of the tests (specifically 07,08,09,13) to time-out if you have a long (time-wise) delay function. If you're passing all of the tests except 07,08,09,13 comment out the call to the delay function in main and try check ing again.

Assignment+Lab+Quiz

Posted by John Shepherd Thursday 12 April 2018, 11:42:37 PM.

Maybe having all of the above due on Sunday was stretching time-management, so I've extended the quiz until Monday midnight.

Debugging SPIM takes time, as many of you are discovering. Starting your assignment on Sunday morning isn't going to work. Start as soon as you can. Well done! to the 60 people who have already submitted.

Being very careful as you write each instruction will save you a lot of debugging pain. QtSPIM is your friend. Watch the register values. Use breakpoints. Enter command-line parameters via Simulator > Run Parameters.

Assignment 1 Auto-tests Now Available

Posted by John Shepherd Thursday 05 April 2018, 02:24:12 PM, last modified Thursday 05 April 2018, 05:48:01 PM.

We've set up some tests cases for checking you worm.s programs.

Access them either via the Assignments menu in the sidebar, or directly via this link

I just updated the scripts to make sure that they use ~cs1521/bin/spim ... just in case people have their own copies floating around.

Also, before you use check , you should comment out the line in main that reads jal delay otherwise your program might time out on some tests. Doing this will also make the whole checking process run much faster.

Special Help Sessions

Posted by John Shepherd Thursday 05 April 2018, 12:17:22 PM.

You can get COMP1521 help (e.g. with assignment 1) at the following times:

• Thursday 5th April from 12-2 in the Flute Lab (Right Now!)
• Thursday 12th April from 12-2 in the Flute Lab

SPIM vs SPIM vs SPIM (ii)

Posted by John Shepherd Wednesday 28 March 2018, 08:34:20 PM, last modified Wednesday 28 March 2018, 08:35:01 PM.

There is not a v9 SPIM available to easily install on the CSE machines.

So, to avoid confusion, we'll be removing /usr/bin/spim (v8) and the only version of SPIM will be the one in ~cs1521/bin/spim (v9).

To use this, you can either type

$ ~cs1521/bin/spim -file File.s

or

$ 1521
$ spim -file File.s

The 1521 command fixes your PATH . From then on, you can run the spim command, simply by typing its name, rather than typing the full ~cs1521/bin/spim pathname.

This will be the version of SPIM used in the exam.

Assignment 1 Testing

Posted by John Shepherd Wednesday 28 March 2018, 10:13:02 AM, last modified Wednesday 28 March 2018, 10:24:46 AM.

Argh! I wasn't auto-subscribed to the Assignment 1 Spec forum, so haven't been getting notified about the questions there.

We planned to test your code on different grid sizes, but I messed up the supplied code and didn't put the grid sizes in .words in the data area, so, as several of you have pointed out, they are hard-wired through the code. This makes it almost impossible to reliably auto-test with different grid sizes, so we won't be doing that. We can run enough tests just by tweaking the command line parameters (e.g. worm length, seed).

So, you can ignore that comment ... which I have just over-struck in the spec.

SPIM vs SPIM vs SPIM

Posted by John Shepherd Thursday 22 March 2018, 01:45:28 PM.

We developed our skeleton for Assignment 1 on spim on our own machines.

And, as we keep telling you not to do, we didn't test it "in the CSE environment" before releasing it.

It turns out that /usr/bin/spim is an older version than the one we used to develop the code, and so it won't run if you simply type spim as the command, which uses the version in /usr/bin/spim.

There's a newer version of spim available as the command ~cs1521/bin/_spim. You can use this while we wait for /usr/bin/spim to be upgraded by the systems support staff.

It looks like qtspim might have a more modern version of spim embedded, so that's also usable.

Week 04 Lab Tests

Posted by John Shepherd Monday 19 March 2018, 10:16:35 PM, last modified Wednesday 21 March 2018, 10:11:25 AM.

Update : Double Arrrrrgggghh! The version of the tests that I put up on Monday night was still incorrect. I fixed it late Tuesday night, so you might want to unzip the new tests (see command below) if you picked them up before 11pm Tuesday.

Arrrgh! I'd forgotten that there was a version of spim in ~cs1521/bin, and I ran the check tests based on that. I've fixed the ZIP files for the lab to explicitly use /usr/bin/spim in the tests. Most people will get this version by default. If you already unzipped lab04.zip , then you should replace your existing tests by doing

unzip /home/cs1521/web/18s1/labs/week04/lab04-tests.zip

If you haven't started the lab yet, doing

unzip /home/cs1521/web/18s1/labs/week04/lab04.zip

will give you the right set of tests.

I'll get rid of the spim in ~cs1521/bin (even though it's less verbose than the one in /usr/bin).

MIPS Functions

Posted by John Shepherd Monday 19 March 2018, 03:45:01 PM, last modified Monday 19 March 2018, 03:56:10 PM.

Lecture slides, examples and videos from today's lectures on implementing functions in MIPS are now online (under Lectures, naturally).

Assignment 1

Posted by John Shepherd Saturday 17 March 2018, 12:05:11 PM, last modified Sunday 18 March 2018, 05:09:09 PM.

The specification and the files for Assignment 1 are now available (via the Assignments link).

The first thing you should do is to read the supplied C code.

After doing that and reading the spec, let me know if anything in the spec needs clarifying.

Quiz 2

Posted by John Shepherd Friday 09 March 2018, 04:45:45 PM, last modified Sunday 11 March 2018, 04:09:02 PM.

I forgot to mention it in lectures, but hopefully you noticed the Quiz2 link in the Upcoming Due Dates.

At least 160 people did notice because they've done it. Maybe the rest of you are saving it until after you've done the Week 02 lab

In any case, Quiz2 is due by Tuesday midnight.

Week 01 Lecture Material

Posted by John Shepherd Saturday 03 March 2018, 12:26:11 PM, last modified Saturday 03 March 2018, 12:28:31 PM.

I finally got around to sorting out the Lecture material for Week 01. This is what you can expect every week to look like: slides, exercises, videos. All will appear after the lecture. If you want to preview what's on the slides, look at the "Coming up ..." section on the most recent Lecture Notices and then look at the relevant Course Notes.

Help Sessions available

Posted by Mei Cheng Whale Friday 02 March 2018, 08:21:28 AM.

Starting today (Friday) in Oboe run by enthusiastic tutors.

Check the Help Sessions Schedule for updates regularly

dcc makes LARGE binaries

Posted by John Shepherd Wednesday 28 February 2018, 11:52:21 PM, last modified Sunday 04 March 2018, 03:40:48 PM.

It seems that dcc likes to make large binaries. For some students this has been causing disk quota problems. One possible solution is to use straight gcc rather than dcc . This is easy to do by changing the CC= line in the Makefile. Another solution is to compile just one catX binary at a time (e.g. make cat1 ) and then remove it before making the next catX binary. The actual problem was people running tests that generated very large outputs. If you're using the check script, it's supposed to prevent this. If you're doing your own tests, make sure you check the sizes of output files, and remove any gigantic ones.

Lecture Video ... Aarrrgggh!

Posted by John Shepherd Monday 26 February 2018, 02:22:27 PM.

Aarrrrggghhh! I forgot to record the screen during the lecture.

But (hopefully) Echo360 did record the screen.

This means I'll have to get the video from Echo360 and do some editing work to stitch it together with the audio and the video of me. This will take a day or two. In the meantime, I'll upload the slides and the exercise we did.

Welcome to COMP1521 18s1

Posted by John Shepherd Thursday 22 February 2018, 01:10:50 PM.

Welcome to the new and hopefully improved version of COMP1521 for 18s1.

This semester, we're giving the 10-week model a trial run, but with the luxury of having 12 weeks if we need them.

Lectures start on Monday 26 February at 12 noon in Mathews A.

Note also that tutes/labs start in Week 1. We'll go relatively easy on you, though. It'll be largely revision of C. I'll post the tute and lab exercises on the weekend. Make sure that have a quick look at them before you first class.

P.S. If you received this notice and you think you're not enrolled in COMP1521, please let me know (jas@cse.unsw.edu.au)