Welcome to the course website for HPPS! All material and general information will be provided here. Announcements, assignment handin, and the discussion forum remains on Absalon. While this website is a Git repository, you are not required or expected to use Git to interact with it, but feel free to do so if convenient for you.
HPPS takes place in block 2. There are three kinds of in-person teaching activities: lectures, exercises and the study café. All take place physically on campus.
Lectures are mostly conventional and serve as warmup for the exercises.
Exercises are conducted in four smaller classes, each conducted by a teaching assistant (TA). An exercise session involves working on problems that will help you learn the curriculum, and in many cases directly train you in the skills you will need for the mandatory assignments.
Study cafés are places where you can get assistance with the mandatory assignments.
This course website is used for handing out material.
Discord can be used for asking questions. (Invite link). Remember to use the same name on Discord as on Absalon. You are not required or expected to use Discord. We continue to monitor the Absalon discussion forum, and course announcements are posted solely on Absalon.
Absalon is used for handing in assignments and for course announcements.
The textbooks are as follows:
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JG: Modern C (CC-licensed PDF)
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HPPS: HPPS course notes PDF - these will be updated as the course progresses, so make sure to regularly check that you have the newest version
Ignore the official class grouping made by KU. Go to whichever class you prefer. Note that Class 4 has the largest and nicest room, and will have two TAs available.
- Lecture: 10:00-12:00 (Aud 03, HCØ).
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Exercises: 10:00-12:00
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Lecture: 13:00-15:00 (Aud 03, HCØ)
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Exercises: 15:00-17:00
Exercises are held in the following four classrooms.
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Class 1: 10:00-12:00, 1-0-10 (DIKU), 15:00-17:00: 1-0-10 (DIKU). TA: Carl Christian.
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Class 2: 10:00-12:00, 1-0-14 (DIKU), 15:00-17:00: 1-0-14 (DIKU). TA: Rasmus Pallisgaard.
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Class 3: 10:00-12:00, Auditorium Syd (NEXS), 15:00-17:00: Auditorium Syd (NEXS). TA: Alexander Vind.
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Class 4: 10:00-12:00, 4-0-10 (Biocenter), 15:00-17:00: 4-0-10 (Biocenter). TA: Michael Ghandforoush, Carl Hartmann.
- Assignment café 13:00-15:00 (Lille UP-1).
There are 5 assignment in total during the course with deadlines every week. They overlap slightly to allow for more flexibility in your scheduling, but think of them as weekly assignments. The assignments are handed out at the beginning of the week. They are handed out on this webpage, and handed in via Absalon.
The assignments will be graded with points from 0 to 4. It is not possible to re-hand-in any of the assignments.
Assignments are made to be solved in groups of preferably three students, but groups of two active students will also do. We strongly encourage you not to work alone. Groups cannot be larger than three students. Each group must make their own solutions and cannot share implementations and report with other. You may however discuss material and ideas.
Do not store your assignments in public GitHub repositories.
The following rules apply to all assignments. They are intended to ease our correction process, and in particular to allow automated testing. Consider the assignments to be a specification or API that you are asked to implement.
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Do not modify the types of any definitions in the handout, except when the assignment text explicitly instructs you to do so.
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Do not rename or remove any definitions that are present in the handout, except when the assignment text explicitly instructs you to do so.
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Do not remove anything from header files.
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Do not rename files or otherwise modify the file tree. (You may add new files if you wish, although it is rarely necessary.)
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Your code should compile without warnings. (Do not achieve this by disabling warnings.)
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When handing in, you must hand in a complete workable program (including unmodified files from the handout).
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When handing in, do not include temporary build files (such as
.o), editor backup files, or various other computer detritus. Run e.g. thetreecommand and read the file listing and ponder for each file whether it is something it makes sense to hand to your TA. At a minimum, runmake cleanbefore handing in. -
Your zip file, should contain a single top-level folder with an appropriate name (e.g.
handin).
Violation of these rules will result in points deductions. If you violate these rules at the exam, it will negatively influence your grade.
Every Friday in from 13:00-15:00 you can attend the assignment café to get help with the assignments.
All written material will be in English.
Most oral teaching will be in Danish or English, depending on the specific teacher or TA.
You will mainly be programming in C and Python.
You will be using a Unix command line and Unix tools for much of the course. See the Unix software guide.
See also this guide on the GDB debugger, which is a very useful tool for debugging C programs.
If you prefer an IDE, see the VS Code installation and setup guide.
MacOS users will run into a problem by week 5 where they cannot run gcc --fopenmp. To solve this problem, check out this guide.
The teachers are
- Troels Henriksen athas@sigkill.dk
- David Gray Marchant david.marchant@di.ku.dk
The TAs are:
- Rasmus Pallisgaard rpa@di.ku.dk
- Alexander Juel Vind avji@di.ku.dk
- Michael Angell Ghandforoush mgh@di.ku.dk
- Carl August Gjerris Hartmann cgha@di.ku.dk
- Carl Christian Ottesen ccot@di.ku.dk
The exam will be a take-home exam that will be very similar in form to the mandatory assignments. See examples of old exams here. It has an estimated workload of 20 hours. It will involve practical programming and performance analysis of programs.
To qualify for the exam you are required to achieve at least 50% of the total number of points in the five assignments (that is, 10 points at minimum). You also need to get at least one point in each of the first five assignment.
Tentative: The exam will likely be held in week 3, Monday 9:00 to Wednesday 12:00.
Each week has an associated subdirectory here on GitHub that lists expected reading and relevant exercises.
You are allowed to use AI-generated code and text in assignments and the exam, but you must explicitly indicate which parts have been generated this way, and which tool you have used. If you do not cite properly, then you are conducting academic dishonesty (i.e., plagiarism), which is treated very seriously by the university.