Marking Scheme

You will receive a mark out of 100 for this coursework, and it is worth 70% of the total unit mark.

How your submission is judged

Think of your submission as being analogous to a CV. Your code, your report and your recorded prompts are claims about what you have done, what you understand, and what you are prepared to defend in the viva.

There is a great deal of latitude in the marking scheme below. Where your mark lands depends heavily on your performance in the viva, so being able to explain and discuss what you have submitted is critical. Submit only what you understand and are ready to talk about: a claim you cannot defend is worth little.

The percentages in the sections below are the percentage of that section's marks.

Parallel Implementation (35 marks)

20% - Single-threaded implementation.

30% - Parallel implementation implementation with the number of workers hardcoded to a non-1 value.

40% - Parallel Game of Life implementation (see Step 2). The number of threads cannot be hardcoded but it may be the case that only some configurations are working (e.g it's only working if the number of threads is a power of 2).

50% - Parallel Game of Life implementation, all configurations working.

Additional marks are available for satisfying further success criteria, up to:

65% - Satisfy all success criteria for this stage with your primary implementation. This is the single implementation that you submit for correctness and expect to discuss primarily in the viva (see Submission).

70%+ - In addition, implement and analyse the three extensions described in Three Memory Strategies: heap allocation, double buffering and map-reduce. Submit them in extensions.zip, and compare them in your benchmarking and analysis.

Distributed Implementation (35 marks)

40% - You must be able to demonstrate a distributed Game of Life implementation. It must be running a single AWS Gol Engine Node that is controlled by a locally running controller (see Step 1).

65% - Satisfy all success criteria for this stage with your primary implementation. This is the single implementation that you submit for correctness and expect to discuss primarily in the viva.

70%+ - In addition, attempt one or more of the extensions. Your primary implementation may itself incorporate extensions. Only additional extensions that are not part of it go in extensions.zip. Be prepared to explain and defend all of them in the viva.

Report (30 marks)

You need to submit a CONCISE (strictly max 6 pages) report which should cover the following topics:

• Functionality and Design:
  Outline what functionality you have implemented, which problems you have solved with your implementations and how your program is designed to solve the problems efficiently and effectively.

• Critical Analysis:

  • Describe the experiments and analysis you carried out.
  • Provide a selection of appropriate results.
  • Keep a history of your implementations and provide benchmark results from various stages.
  • Explain and analyse the benchmark results obtained.
  • Analyse the important factors responsible for the virtues and limitations of your implementations.

Make sure your team member’s names and user names appear on page 1 of the report.
Do not include a cover page.