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MN201 is the fundamental subject at this university in the field of scientific computing. There have been many new and exciting developments in high performance computing (HPC) at this institution with the arrival of the 22 processor IBM SP2 as part of a Queensland Universities parallel computing intitiative and a 64 processor Silicon Graphics Origin at the University of Queensland. The UQ machine has a peak performance of about 26 Gflops.
In addition the newly devloped visualisation laboratory (ViSAC) has 20 O2 SGI workstations plus a 3D visualisation engine. All lectures and tutorials will take place in ViSAC.
For the first time this course will be run in a web based environment within ViSAC. All the notes that you will need for this course are provided on-line through the WWW.
The reason for this is that more and more university courses will be delivered electronically and it is our responsibility that students attain familiarity with the WWW and this mode of delivery. For those interested MN320 is delivered in the same manner. The notes are based on an undergraduate computational engineering and science project in the USA developed at NCSU.
If you get a slip account from Prentice you will be able to download these notes as you require at home and work on the assignments at home. However, you will not be able to login or telnet into the VISAC machines. Note that students are imposed a time limit per week on the use of their slip accounts.
For those who can afford the price (about $80) - you can buy a student version of matlab for pcs. This will enable you to do all the matlab work at home on a pc if you so wish.
MN201 is 100% internally assessed with no exam. Each of the modules in the WWW notes has a small assignment which you are expected to complete more or less on a weekly basis. Hand in dates are described below under "ASSIGNMENTS AND MARKING". You can to do your assignment in tex and html or hand written neatly. The choice is yours.
All the notes that you should need for the course are available under this web site. You should at some stage read through the slides and the text book that are on-line.
PLEASE DO NOT print everything out (unless it is on your own printer!). One of the aims of this course is to save paper!
The main contents of the this subject are