As the lecture material was covered, students worked on their first of two programming assignments. The goal was to develop a feeling for timings on the SDSU mainframe compared to accuracy of approximation schemes. Students were asked to assess how much it costs (measured in CPU time) to get a good answer (measured by true error). Since most students had little numerical analysis background, the instructor provided the original code for the "First Program" problem in Fortran and C, and the students were instructed to identify the crucial loops and insert the appropriate timing calls.
First Programming Assignment 1991
First Programming Assignment 1992 and on
Second Computational Experiment
Sources of Problems Statements
Topics to be covered in your Technical Report