Computer Science 400 Parallel Processing Siena College Fall 2008

We have three goals with the first week's lab assignment: to familiarize you with our cluster system, to introduce you to the Unix environment, and to introduce you to programming in C. I understand that this is the first experience with Unix for many of you, so I expect a lot of questions.

There are several files to turn in for this assignment, due at 11:59 PM, Tuesday, September 9, 2008.

1. Send me mail at jteresco@siena.edu with a brief (a couple sentences) indication of your level of experience programming in C and with the Unix operating system and its variants. Please include a list of other operating systems you have used and other programming languages you have used and your proficiency in each, and anything else you'd like me to know about your background coming in. (1 point)
2. Identify the function of and experiment with these Unix Commands:

    
   ls    cd      cp      mv     rm     mkdir   pwd
   man   chmod   cat     more   grep   head    tail
   ln    find    rmdir   wc     diff   tar
   

   Give a one sentence description of each command in a file unix.txt.
3. Emacs (emacs from the Unix command line) is a powerful text editor. You will want to become familiar with it. Identify the function of and experiment with these Emacs Commands:

    
   C-x C-s   C-x C-c   C-x C-f   C-x C-w   C-g   C-a   C-e        
   C-d       C-_       C-v       M-v       C-s   C-r   M-%
   

   C- before a key means hold down Ctrl and hit that key. M- indicates the "Meta" key, which on most systems is Esc. To issue a Meta command, hit the Esc key, release it, then hit the key for the command you wish to issue. Use the keystrokes rather than the menus. It will save you time in the long run! Include a brief description of each Emacs keystroke in your file unix.txt. Learn these commands - you will use them often. Hints can be found in the Unix and Emacs web pages linked from the course website. Ask others in the lab if you're not sure how to do something in the Unix environment. Share your tips and tricks with each other.
4. Make a directory in your account for CS 400 work (perhaps "400" or "cs400" might be reasonable). Use the chmod command to restrict access to this directory so only you can read the files.
5. Copy the C program here that computes the late penalties for this course to your cluster account. Compile and run it, redirecting your output to a file late.txt. (1 point)
6. This question is postponed! Copy the file /cluster/home/terescoj/shared/make-example.tar to your cluster account. It is a "tar file" of a small C program that demonstrates the use of multiple source files and Makefiles. Extract the files (tar xvf make-example.tar) and compile the program with make. In a plain text file called make.txt, briefly describe how make uses the rules in the Makefile to produce the executable main. (1 point)
7. Write a C program that takes an arbitrary number of command-line parameters, each of which should represent an integer value. Print out the sum of the values provided. Call your C program argadder.c and include a Makefile that guides compilation of your program into an executable argadder. (3 points) Hint: See main.c in the make example, and note that the parameter argc to the main function is a count of how many command-line strings are included in the argv array of strings. Also, argv[0] is not the first parameter, it is the program name itself, and this array entry for the program name is included in the value of argc.

When you are finished, use the turnin utility on the cluster head node to submit the files unix.txt, late.txt, make.txt, argadder.c, and Makefile. Recall the steps to do this are to set up your turnin for this lab with the command:

turnin setup lab1

Then copy the files into the directory ~/turnin/400/lab1, then submit with the command

turnin submit lab1

Please use the exact filenames specified (for this lab and all semester) to make my job easier when gathering your submissions together for grading. Also, do not include any extraneous files (such as emacs backup files, executable files, etc.). You don't want to annoy your grader with misnamed or missing files just before he grades your assignment.