CIS 372 - Spring 2000
University of Delaware
Guide for Student Presentations
(15%) Short oral presentation on a real-life application of parallelism. You will search the
web for a demonstration of an application that depends on parallelism to achieve its goal,
and present a short (15 minute) presentation describing the application and how it utilizes
parallelism and why parallelism is so crucial to its success.
- Pair up with someone in the class to do this project.
- Do a quick web search, and create a short list of
real-life applications you will choose from for your final presentation.
A short list is 2-3 potential applications to examine.
- Hand in the following in class, April 23:
A single sheet of paper that contains:
1. The names of the people in your group.
2. The short list of potential applications to examine.
For each item on the list, write at least 2 sentences
describing enough of the application to clue me in on what it is.
Just a single word or two is not enough to let me know what you are
investigating.
3. The source of information that you have found on each of the
topics, in order to start preparing for your presentation.
A web site address for each one is fine. An article from a journal,
magazine, or conference is also fine. For an article, list the
citation.
- Reserve a presentation time by signing the chart in class on Thursday,
April 23.
- Create an outline for a 15 minute talk on paper, focusing on the items
listed below.
- Decide how you will share the responsibility of the preparation and presentation. Each person should give part of the presentation.
- Create the overheads in the final form, printed on overhead slides or
using a laptop.
- Practice your talk aloud at least twoce before presenting it on your
scheduled presentation date.
- If possible, spend 10-30 minutes going over your talk as close to your
presentation time as possible to refamiliarize yourselves with what you
want to say.
- Give your presentation to the class.
applications overview and links to other sites:
http://www.llnl.gov/asci/overview/aps.html
global climate modeling:
http://www.llnl.gov/CASC/climate/climate.html
nuclear well logging:
http://www.llnl.gov/CASC/well_log
visualization of Tokamak Gyro-fluid turbulence:
http://www.acl.lanl.gov/GrandChal/Tok/gdk/SC95n.html
modeling subsurface flow and chemical migration:
http://www.llnl.gov/CASC/ParFlow
three-dimensional hydrodynamic instability and turbulence modeling:
http://www.llnl.gov/CASC/asciturb/asciturb.html
modeling biomechanics of human joints and prosthetic implants:
http://www-iscr.llnl.gov
3-d seismic imaging of complex geologies:
http://www.cs.sandia.gov/~dewombl/ACTI16.html
modeling materials:
http://midway.ca.sandia.gov/~judson/ASCI/ASCI_poly.html
- Organize your talk well in advance.
A typical organization for a talk on the topics for this
presentation is as follows:
- Overview: General overview of the application area. What kinds of general problems are
they trying to solve? Ex. weather modeling, what kinds of weather modeling?
- Justification: Usefulness of the application: how is the application beneficial? Why is
it important? Ex. helps in predicting the weather, preparing for hurricanes,...
- Underlying Computational Methods: More detailed look at the computational
methods used to solve these
problems. Is it a numerical computation? If so, what kinds of numerical
computation is being done? Is a simulation? If so, what is involved in
the simulation? Ex. finite element code, partial differential equations,
Jacobi iteration, sparse matrix computations... Try to explain in layperson
terms what the method does.
- Potential for Parallelism: How is parallelism important to the application? How can parallelism benefit the application?
What kind of parallelism is possible? Ex. data parallelism on the points
in the atmosphere, data parallelism on the particles in the simulation,...
- Parallelization Details: What language, library, architecture... have
the researchers used to gain parallelism in their application? Ex. MPI
message passing on a cluster of 100 DEC Alpha workstations,
High Performance Fortran on an SGI Powerchallenge with 12 processors,...
- Demonstrated Performance Gains: Do the folks have any performance
numbers to show how their application is aided by parallelism? If so,
show some of their speedups?
- Closing Remarks: Has parallelism solved their problems?
- Put some thought into what you want to put on your slides. They will
drive the flow of your talk.
- Take on the challenge of capturing the audience's attention with your
introduction, keeping them interested through your slides and
possibly some
light humor, avoiding burial in a pile of details, and teaching them the
most important points/issues about your topic.
- Practice your talk aloud to yourself or to a group of colleagues.
This is the only way that you can be sure that you have the appropriate
amount of material to cover no more and no less than 15 minutes.
This also gives you confidence in what you are going to say.
- If possible, spend 10-30 minutes going over your talk to yourself
as close to your presentation time as possible to refamiliarize yourself
with what you want to say. I always go over my talks and lectures within
the hour of when I am going to do the presentation. It makes a world of
difference.
- Eye contact: You should glance around the room, making eye contact with
various people. The talk should not be directed to the ceiling, floor,
the slide projector, or only a small portion of
the class. If you do not want to look at anyone,
just look over their heads.
- Voice: Be sure to talk at a pace that the audience can follow. Most
of us tend to talk very quickly when we are nervous. You need to consciously
be aware of how fast you are talking. Be sure to talk loud and clear enough
that people in the back of the room can hear and understand you.
If you think people are going to have trouble understanding your English,
talk slower than normal.
You should take no more than 8 slides total.
You can either put them through the laser printer to get slides
made with output from the computer, print them out on paper and then
xerox the paper versions, or use the appropriate colored pens for
slides. Even if you decide to use the computer generated slides,
you can still add color through underlining, bulleting, and overwriting
key words. The department has some you can probably borrow, and I also have
some you can borrow. They also sell them at the bookstore for a reasonable
price. You should
follow the following guidelines in preparing your
slides.
- The rule of thumb is 2 minutes per slide. Therefore, a 15 minute talk
should not consist of more than 8 slides.
- Plan your slides on notebook paper first with careful consideration of
white space and the size of the letters.
A good rule is 2 tablet lines height for a letter to insure
that everyone can read your slides.
Or, use slitex or WORD to create your slides. 18 point is the normal slide
pointsize for readability.
- Begin each slide with a centered title that states in 1-4 words the
contents of that slide.
- For a text slide, use outline style with short phrases as opposed to
paragraphs of full sentences. Put no more than 4-5 main points (bullets)
on a single slide.
If you are worried that you might forget to say something if you do not have
it written on a slide, write it on a separate sheet of paper that you can use
as backup. When I first started giving talks, I used the sheets of paper
separating the slides for this purpose. It is comforting to know that it
is written down somewhere in front of you, but the audience does not have
to see all of that writing.
DO NOT PUT WHOLE PARAGRAPHS ON A SLIDE.
- Break up your talk with pictures and color whenever possible.
- Different font sizes, boldness, italics, and underlining should be used
to demonstrate the relative importance of different points.
Each student in the class will fill out an evaluation form for each
presentation. These evaluations will be anonymous, and given to the
students as feedback at the final exam. The instructor will independently
grade each oral presentation. Both the student evaluation and the
grade will be based on: the speaker's perceived understanding of the topic,
organization of the material, presentation of the material, quality of
visual aids, treatment of questions, enjoyment level of talk, and overall
effectiveness of the presentation. The pair of students in charge of
a given topic will receive the same grade for the presentation.
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