Scientific Computing Department (1/2)

السلام عليكم و رحمة الله

As an SC graduate, it's time to share what I've learnt from SC, so the new comers to this department can know more about it..

First, I want to mention that we were 27 students in this department, about 12 of us chose it to be their first choice (including me :D)

It's a good thing to be in a small department, we used to study together, help each other, take some decisions regarding cancelling a lecture or an exam (6) :D, anyone understands anything can explain it to others, I felt like it was a small family..

Why SC?

For me, because of Visualization, Mathematical Programming, and Geometry. These courses are SC exclusive.

About first term courses:

1. Scientific Visualization

Was one of the courses I enjoyed studying. It was mainly about how to convert some numeric data to visual scenes so it can be easily understood, and assign colors to some types of data. Like coloring the hot areas in a plane's 3D model with red, and cold areas with blue..

It's practical part is to make a package able to building mesh models from data files and color the model according to the color map you'll make.

Here is a sample of what the package should do :)

The instructor was good, and his final exam was very easy, some MCQ and T/F questions! I remember he gave us some topics to search for and discuss the results with him instead of having a mid-term exam :D

2. High Performance Computing - known as HPC

Dr. Hossam Faheem's course :D the very special course in FCIS :D special in everything .. lectures, concepts, exams, labs, ... everything :D

This course talks about some parallel computing techniques and how to run your code on more than 1 processor in a parallel way.. 

It's practical part was about MPI and openMP, and our final task was to deliver some programs able to make parallel matrix multiplication and parallel LCS finding problem using MPI and openMP..

The final exam was an open-everything exam :D use whatever you can use: books, papers, lecture notes, Google, Wikipedia, ... and the most important thing: your brain :D and start thinking of different ways to solve the questions. 

HPC was a common course between SC and CSys.

3. Mathematical Programming

Do you know Dijkstra, Max-flow,  graph coloring, and connected components algorithms, and some other graph algorithms? then you can enter mathematical programming final exam and have high marks without much studying :D

I didn't like our instructor's lectures, but the practical part was very interesting.

Here's my Graph Editor, the final package for this course.

4. Finite Element Methods

Solve differential equations until death :D 

It's a veryyyy easy course -from my point of view- although I didn't enjoy it a lot, but I liked the different methods used to solve mathematical problems..

No practical for this course. 

5. Simulation and Modelling

Common between SC and CS, talks about how to simulate some real life processes to be able to take some decisions according to the simulation results. Example: Simulate how customers arrive to a barber's shop and how long will they wait in a queue to be served, then decide weather to increase the number of barbers or not ..

It's practical part is to deliver some programs able to simulate some real systems, like banks, supermarkets, etc... and take some decisions to save resources and increase profit..

The instructor was excellent, and so was the mid-term and final exams :D

That was our first term courses in SC. Will talk about second term later إن شاء الله :)