[Swift-devel] Improvements to Swift tutorial

[Michael Wilde]

Justin, David,

Below are good comments from Robin Weiss on the tutorial. If you have further suggestions for improvements, can you provide them on this thread?

Ones that I recall from user questions:

- explain semantics and flexibility of arrays in more detail: (dynamic, N-dimension, sparse, string-indexable)

- explain up front that Swift is locally developed.

And one that occurred to me:

- show that/how Swift can achieve high parallelism (in the example runs... We didnt go beyond 25 parallel jobs per run).

Thanks,

- Mike


On the slide where you show an example app function (if I recall, it was
some sort of chemistry thing) there were a couple of typos ("temp" should
have been "t", etcŠ).  It also may be good to make it a little more clear
that what swift does is make system calls to something on the command
line.  I.e., show some dummy command how it looks on the command line like
"./myScript -param1 val1 -param2 val2" and then show that the app function
does something like "runMyScript -param1" variable1 "-param2" variable2.

Also, in the example where you have the fMRI data, the usage of the word
"Run" was a little misleading.  I realize that a "Run" is a data object,
but "run" is also a verb so it could me misconstrued that "Run" is telling
swift to "Run" something.  See what I mean?

Finally, in the tutorial section, I think it would be good to actually
work through some example workflow to make the ideas of swift more
concrete.  There are good examples in the online documentation/tutorial
that I found really helpful when I was learning swift.  For example, do
something where you have a bunch of dummy input decks, they get mapped,
passed in parallel to some app function that outputs intermediate "data"
files, and then aggregate all of the results in some sort of dummy
"analyze" app function.

Anyway, just some thoughtsŠ

Robin

-- 
Robin M. Weiss
Research Programmer
Research Computing Center
The University of Chicago
6030 S. Ellis Ave., Suite 289C
Chicago, IL 60637
robinweiss at uchicago.edu <mailto:labello at uchicago.edu>
773.702.9030






On 11/27/12 11:07 PM, "Michael Wilde" <wilde at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

>Hi Robin, Nick,
>
>Thanks very much for you help in setting up and running the tutorial.
>
>Can we get an email list of attendees, and follow up with pointers to
>slides and material?
>
>We'll need to update the runswift script to remove the reservation
>linkage, which causes jobs to fail if the user is not part of the
>reservation.
>
>Lets think about scheduling another tutorial in January if RCC is
>interested; we certainly are!
>
>Thanks and regards,
>
>- Mike
>
>
>-- 
>Michael Wilde
>Computation Institute, University of Chicago
>Mathematics and Computer Science Division
>Argonne National Laboratory
>


-- 
Michael Wilde
Computation Institute, University of Chicago
Mathematics and Computer Science Division
Argonne National Laboratory