First Day of Vacation

Well, actually the vacation started yesterday evening. Had a great evening at my school. It was our annual day yesterday. Nothing much to note happened today. Went out for certain things I had planned for the vacation.

Spend the evening on the internet. I watched a few videos on TED. Here are two that I found interesting. One is about Yves Rossy, a man who has made equipments to fly like a bird, that is to control the flight using the movements of his body.
Here is the TED video link and below is the YouTube video

 

Another video was about Thomas Suarez, a 12-year old app developer. Here is the TED link.

Getting to know the HPC hardware

Today was a very special day at CHPC. We reached here at 7.30 in the morning and were told that we would be having class on C Programming. We learnt some C programming and then came the exciting part. Finally, we got to see what's within the CHPC room!

We were shown the high performance computer we have here at FISAT. It was really interesting to know that it was made up of many parts, which looked like a normal CPU, connected together. Then, we were shown the Server Room. Something that we noticed quickly was that the room was quite noisy. The operation of the equipments inside produced such a lot of noise. We were also shown the UPS room.

Then, we had class and in between we talked on various topics ranging from hacking to the Blue Waters project (the supercomputer being developed by the University of Illinois). We also discussed about the ethics of a professional. Then we had a small Christmas celebration. Mahesh Sir bought us a cake and we cut it in the lab. Unni Sir and Jestin Sir also joined us in the celebration.

During the afternoon session, we were asked to give feedback about the classes we had here at CHPC. The unanimous reply was that everyone enjoyed it. We were also given a chance to tell the topics we had trouble with.

We got tips for the Christmas vacation. Digital Electronics and Discrete Mathematics were to be familiarised. Watching TED videos, atleast one a day, was mandatory. Something important that we were reminded about was to keep updating our blogs.

That was the end of CHPC classes for this year and we dispersed after wishing each other Christmas.

Assignment day again!

Today was yet another day of assignments. Of course we knew that yesterday itself. The assignment we got today was from Digital Electronics.

We were given six questions and were asked to do it in teams of four members each, which meant every team got three questions. My teammates were Anto, Athira and Vivek. The questions we selected were to design a full adder, a comparator and a DFA to accept even number of zeroes. The full adder and comparator circuits were really simple and it was finished quickly. DFA was the one that took time and we did manage to make it work partially.

Then, we waited for Mahesh Sir to come and he spend time talking to us. At the end of the day, we were asked to do the blogging part but not before assuring us a Christmas celebration.

Great day at CHPC

Yesterday was a great day at CHPC. Yesterday's class was to be taken by
Bejoy Sir. But, when we reached here at nine in the morning, we were told
that he couldn't take class due to some reason and so we were to have
Mahesh Sir's class on C Programming.

We had studied C Programming in our third semester. So, first of all, we
were asked to empty our cups and start learning C Programming from the
beginning. We started from the basic programs and compiled it. Then, we
were told about the various types of errors. Errors were classified into
Syntax errors and Semantic errors. Syntax errors are caused due to
violation of the programming language syntax or the grammar of the
programming language. Semantic errors are those caused due to wrong logical statements.

Then, we were told that the speed of a high performance computer is measured in FLOPS. Now that was a new term for us. FLOPS stands for FLoating point Operations Per Second. We were also told about GCC (GNU Compiler Collections).

The afternoon session was taken by Unni Sir. He told us about mind maps and made one about career after B.Tech. That was really interesting, wondering why he kept on asking in between whether the class was boring. It was far from boring.

The last session of the day was taken by Parvathy Ma'am on Digital Electronics. Though we had learnt it before, it was only when she explained it to us that we understood how certain results were obtained. It was nice knowing how many of the things we learnt blindly were actually obtained.

A full day of microprocessor programming

The time table said that we were having a Mini Project today. I came here wondering what is meant by a Mini Project. When we reached here, Mahesh Sir told that he had prepared a few questions on microprocessor programming as an assignment and he would print it and give it to us in a few minutes time. Meanwhile, we could browse the internet to clear our doubts on microprocessors and get an idea about microprocessor programming.

Soon we were given the set of 8 questions and were asked to form teams of 2 members. Each team had to select 2 questions. The time allotted for completing it was from 9.15 in the morning to 3 in the afternoon. If we could finish the two questions on time, then we could attempt one of the four extra questions. My teammate was Vivek. The questions we selected were to find the nth fibonocci number and to convert a decimal value to binary.

First, we attempted the question on fibonocci. The logic of it was very simple involving just addition. It was just a matter of few minutes before we were done with the question. Then, we started with the question on converting a decimal number to it's binary form. It involved addition, subtraction, multiplication and division processes. But, 8085 microprocessor does not have operations of multiplication and division. So, we had to do it by repeated additions and subtractions. It took us a bit of time to get it right. After a series of mistakes, we finally managed to convert the decimal number entered to it's binary form.

We thought of attempting the extra questions, but by then it was three in the noon and we stopped our programming and went to Mahesh Sir. We were asked to rate our answers and suggest measures to improve ourselves. Then we did the blogging and that was the end of this end at CHPC.

Microprocessor

The big change today was that today's class was taken by Bejoy Sir. It was the first time we didn't have Mahesh Sir's class at CHPC. The class started at 9.30 AM. The entire morning session was spend on theory part of Microprocessors. I thought it would be very tough but it turned out to be much easier.

We started from the basic equation of Ohm's law and slowly came to Digital Electronics. We discussed about the various logic gates. Then, we came to the concept of trigger in clocked combinational logic. We came to know that the number of triggers in a second was the speed of the logic circuit. After that we came to the main topic of the day, Microprocessors.

Microprocessor was defined as "a programmable, clock-driven, register-based electronic device which can receive binary digits as the inputs, process binary data according to the instruction given by the master and give an output in the binary form". We came to know that the first microprocessor was 4004 designed by Ted Hoff at Intel. 4004 was a 4-bit microprocessor.

Later, we discussed about computers. Computers are classified as large size (such as mainframes), medium size (such as servers) and small size (such as desktops). An embedded system is a combination of the processing unit (processor), program and the mechanical parts. A Register is a small and fast memory in the processor. An important thing to note is that registers reside close to the processor.

The afternoon session was spent entirely at the microprocessor lab. We did programming on the microprocessors in assembly language. When we entered the lab, we thought it would be very difficult. But it turned out to be easy and fun, just that even adding had to be done in a sequence of steps in assembly language and not in a single step as in high level language.

At last we had the blogging session and that was the end of a very good day at CHPC.

Applying knowledge

Being a Sunday, the class started only at 10 o'clock. When we came, little did we know that today was going to be a very hectic one. When we reached class, there was Mahesh Sir with a paper in his hand. A peek at the paper and we knew we were going to have an assignment today.

There were 8 questions in all, 4 each from Programming and Electronics. We were asked to divide ourselves into 4 groups of 2 members each and each group had to select 2 questions, one each from Electronics and Programming. My teammate was Vivek. We selected our questions and after some time came to know that our Programming question was already selected by another group. So, we started to do the only question left out.

The Programming question we got was to convert an image to greyscale using the for-loop and also by vector implementation and compare both. Our Electronics question was to toggle a DC motor ON and OFF using a push button switch. We were given 3 hours for this and a computer for Internet access. As soon as the computer booted up, we started storming Google with searches. Only God and Google can say how many searches we did today.

Not finding any solutions for the Programming question on the Internet, we decided to do it ourselves and by noon we were able to do it. The Electronics question was the one that took us more time. As we were shown how to operate the DC motor using a push button switch the previous day, we wired it quickly and decided to modify it according to our need. After a lot of searches, we decided to use IC 7476 to make it work. We wired up the circuit but were disappointed that it didn't work out.

Mahesh Sir then arrived and asked us to rate our team by ourselves. We rated us 90 for our Programming question and 60 for the Electronics one. Dunno why we were asked to do it. Then, he talked about what was coming for us in the following days.

And at last, we had the blogging session.