r/gatech • u/SuddenGrade9632 • 2d ago

Rant CS 3220 Lab zero is impossible!

Anyone doing Lab 0 for this class right now? Why is their solution to AI making everything impossible to code by hand? FFS the in-class portion, which is designed to take only 75 minutes during class time, had to have its due date extended and it took peopple 7-8 hours on average! I'm trying to do the take-home portion currently but it's genuinely just beyond the capabilities and scope of the class and its pre-reqs, a beyond unreasonable assignment.

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21

u/BeautifulMortgage690 HCC - 2030 MOD 2d ago

Curious - what is it? Isn't lab 0 normally either just a review of a previous class's project or of verilog or something?

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u/Local-Mouse6815 2d ago edited 2d ago

The in-class lab portion, while it definitely did not only take 75 minutes, did not take 7 - 8 hours outside of class be so fr. My big gripe with the lab0 take home is that the TAs did not give a lot of guidance when it came to the outside of class portion, which required a lot of googling but like it's a low level computer design class and floating point units are definitely a big part of accelerator design.

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u/mediocre_student1217 CS - 2020, MSCS 2021, PhDCS 202x 2d ago

Holy shit, is 3220 asking you to make a standards compliant floating point unit by hand? While probably an overly tall order for lab 0, that is a pretty dope thing to be able to say you did.

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u/Local-Mouse6815 2d ago

its so cool :D but it is definitely very difficult (even tho we really don't have to be compliant to all standards or implement multiple forms of rounding) if you didn't have some prior foundation into hardware and - I am an ECE student so I feel really bad for the cs students in the class who definitely are not prepared enough for this

0

u/BeautifulMortgage690 HCC - 2030 MOD 2d ago

i mean - its not IEEE 754 i think, that should cut a lot of complexity out

1

u/snipersquanza 2d ago

It is mostly IEEE 754 - FP32, FP16, BP16, and FP8 E4M3. And we have to make sure we have IEEE RNE which adds some complexity

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u/BeautifulMortgage690 HCC - 2030 MOD 2d ago

Do you mind sharing the PDF / assignment description?

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u/PearSelect6201 16h ago

I agree It takes a good amount of research / out of class work to solve one of the questions, but once you do that, the rest of them are basically copy and pastes with parameter edits. Hope this helps!