Update on CW5, CW6?

[davidanderle]

We were expecting at least one grade by the end of February (according to lecture notes) but so far we have not received anything. Can we please get an update on the status of the last two CWs?

[m8pple]

The effects of meltdown/spectre meant that the EC2 instances were unreliable into late Dec (which friends at Amazon suggest might be the machine freezes I was seeing in Dec), then all the CW5+CW6 results (all performance, and some correctness) had to be discarded anyway at the end of Jan because of changes in performance on the same instance. Essentially, I couldn't easily determine whether something had crashed due to the period of meltdown instability, or due to the implementation. The performance impact of the meltdown patches couldn't easily be determined, as it depends a great deal on how people implemented things. So in early Feb all the benchmarking/correctness runs started again, running on spot instances to minimise cost. In late Feb with the strikes coming up I switched to concentrate on 2nd years who are currently doing their coursework module, so that they could work on it during the strike, and trying to make sure final-year and PhD students would be set up. Since the strike days finished, I haven't had a chance to start up the assessment process again as there are more urgent things for students who are currently doing assessments this term. The department is going to pay for on-demand instances to speed things up, but it's still bottlenecked on me looking at every submission again. - I haven't said much about marking progress, because feedback in SOLE and via other routes said that people weren't interested in operational details (apparently my emails are too long), so I was just keeping quiet until there was an email with a letter grade coming out.

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On 2018-03-12 18:08, David Anderle wrote: We were expecting at least one grade by the end of February (according to lecture notes) but so far we have not received anything. Can we please get an update on the status of the last two CWs? — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#67>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AC4nQX6gSNi0JSaw1wTof6nhPqmhZDMbks5tdrmagaJpZM4SnIAX>.

[davidanderle]

Thank you, I understand. I certainly wouldn't want the marking process to be corrupted by meltdown. Good luck!