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Assignment 3 Speed Bonus

This document outlines the requirements for the Assignment 3 Speed Bonus. The information here supersedes any details in the assignment PDF, as it is updated more frequently.

Warning

The information here may be updated often. Check back regularly to ensure you have the latest information. We will try to make announcements if the changes are major.

Rules

  1. Bonus Marks:

    • Each team can earn a maximum of 1 bonus mark per team for this speed bonus.
    • These marks are awarded based on how fast your submitted program runs (wall-clock time) relative to others in CS3210.
    • We will grade the speed bonus offline after the assignment submission deadline.
    • There will be no live leaderboard for the speed bonus.

  2. How Bonus Marks Are Awarded:

    • We will rank teams based on the performance of their submitted executable on our private performance test cases.
    • We will award 1 bonus mark to the top 10 teams.
    • We will award 0.5 bonus marks to the 11th to 15th teams.
    • If there are any ties, all tied teams will be considered to be within the same rank.

  3. Submission Requirements by Deadline:

    • We will grade the regular executable submitted for Assignment 3.
    • You do not need to provide separate bonus, bonus.debug, or bonus.perf Makefile recipes.
    • Your submitted program must fulfill all the same correctness and submission requirements as the main assignment.
    • Incorrect submissions, crashing submissions, or submissions that exceed our timeout may be disqualified from the speed bonus.

  4. Bonus Page Requirement:

    • You must add a maximum one-page bonus section to your final report explaining the techniques you used and how they contribute to performance.
    • This page is not counted in the report page limit.

Note

We reserve the right to disqualify submissions that do not follow the rules. Furthermore, we will enforce the spirit of the rules. We aim to reward genuine attempts at fast and correct code, not exploits of the grading system itself.

Grading Configuration

  • Hardware: We will test your code on two specific w5-3423 machines (031 and 032). These will be the same two machines for all speed-bonus grading runs.
  • Correctness: We will perform correctness checks before considering a submission for the speed bonus.
  • Timing: We will run each program several times and use the measured wall-clock time for ranking.
  • Timeout: If your program takes too long, it will timeout and will not be considered for the speed bonus.
  • Test Case Sizes: The private performance test cases will be close in size to the largest provided test cases.

Submission Procedure

There is no separate speed-bonus submission procedure.

Submit Assignment 3 as usual. After the assignment deadline, we will run the regular executable from your Assignment 3 submission and use those results for offline speed-bonus grading.

FAQ

Do I need to submit a separate bonus executable?

No. We will grade the regular executable submitted for Assignment 3.

Do I need to add bonus, bonus.debug, or bonus.perf recipes?

No. Separate bonus recipes are not required.

Will there be a leaderboard?

No. Speed-bonus grading will be done offline after the assignment submission deadline.

What size will the hidden performance tests be?

They will be close in size to the largest provided test cases.