Bonus Problem: I Feel the Need...

Note for 1st Years: you don't need to attempt/complete this problem in order to obtain a PDP point. That being said, it's a fun challenge, so we recommend you give it a go anyway (and might help with future courseworks...)

Open optimise.py in the bonus directory. What does it do? Great question! That's not your problem. All we want you to do is make it run as fast as possible.

Rules

• The code must run on the DCS machines
• The output of the optimised code must be the same as that of the original for all inputs

That's all - go wild.

Getting started

Running the code locally

The Makefile provides a target local, which will run the code on your local machine. It can be run with:

make local

You can then change the input data to the program by modifying the values of GRID_SIZE and NUM_AGENTS in the Makefile, or setting them as environment variables.

Once you have got the hang of running the code, you can start trying to optimise it!

Checking your outputs

The Makefile provides a target check, which will try to compare the output of running your code against a set of provided solutions in the expected/ directory. It will report if the output is the same, or show the difference between your output and the expected one. It can be run with:

make check

Running on DCS batch compute

Please note that anything the runs correctly on your normal DCS account will run correctly on DCS batch compute as well!

The Makefile provides a target batch, which will run your code on the DCS batch compute system, which you can read more about here. This might take some time to queue and run, but allows you to run on the testing environment, and leverage some of the flags in the sbatch file. It can be run with:

make batch

This will create a file starting with joboutput in the bonus directory containing the output of the run.

Submission

You need to submit a zip file containing:

• The run.sbatch file
• Any other required code files, for example optimise.py

The Makefile provides a target submission, which will zip up the contents of the bonus directory (which includes these things already) for you. It can be run with:

make submission

Email this zip file to academic@uwcs.co.uk

Marking

We will unzip your submitted files, then test them using the run.sbatch file on the DCS batch compute system for a variety of input data. If any of the tests produce output different to the original, your submission will be disqualified. Finally, we will produce a ranking of valid solutions from fastest to slowest.

Tips

There are many different ways you could approach this challenge. Some good places to start might be:

• Algorithmic optimisations
• Using a different language / compiler flags
• Using parallel processing approaches

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Good Luck!

UWCS Academic Team