CS 575 Technical Writing

Writing is a key component to this Computer Science course. Most of the students have no problem with the computer ethics essay described above, but they typically have had little experience in writing a technical report. Therefore, an initial computational experiment (problem statement given in the next section) is assigned that consists of the following components:

1. Take a code given by the instructor (in Fortran or C) and modify it to include calls to the UNIX timer, dtime
2. Examine the output from your code to gain an understanding of the measured performance.
3. Write a report giving and justifying your conclusion on performance.

This is followed by the main computational experiment which is chosen individually by each student depending on their interests and consists of:

1. Solve a science-oreinted problem on a campus mainframe and document the mainframe's performance in a written report.
2. Solve the same problem on the Cray.
3. Compute an enhancement of the problem on the Cray and document the Cray's performance relative to the campus mainframe in a written report.

Instructor feedback after reading the document from the first assignment greatly enhanced the organization and content of the final document.