CMU

Here are my thoughts on the courses I took or audited during my second semester at CMU. On Grading at CMU I received straight A’s again this semester. However, I’ve noticed some peculiar aspects of CMU’s grading system. Graduate students in the Carnegie Institute of Technology (College of Engineering) cannot receive A+ grades in transcript even if they scored A+ in a class not offered by CIT, capping their GPA at 4.0. Since an A+ is worth 4.33 on the GPA scale, graduate students in other colleges can offset an A- with an A+ to maintain a 4.0, whereas engineering students cannot. This policy likely stems from CIT being CMU’s oldest and original college, preserving a traditional grading system without A+ grades. ...

This project implements a high-performance parallel pricing engine for American options using the Binomial Options Pricing Model (BOPM), engineered to scale efficiently from multi-core CPUs to GPU-accelerated clusters. By leveraging OpenMP, CUDA and MPI, it addresses the algorithm’s sequential bottlenecks through a diverse set of optimization strategies. More details at: https://github.com/l1-ca0/parallel-binomial-option-pricing

Today is the last — and coldest — day of the semester. I ended the term by giving a recitation for 10‑703 on applying reinforcement learning to diffusion models.

Lock-free programming has this magical aura around it. If you’ve ever heard of lock-free programming, you’ve probably seen those neat little Compare-And-Swap (CAS) loops that seem to solve everything. I found a bug in a CAS loop that had been sitting quietly in CMU’s 15-418 Parallel Computer Architecture lecture slide for years. The “Simple” Example Here’s what the example in lecture slide looked like: // atomic compare and swap int atomicCAS(int* addr, int compare, int val) { int old = *addr; *addr = (old == compare) ? val : old; return old; } // build atomic max using CAS void atomic_max(int* addr, int x) { int old = *addr; int new = max(old, x); while (atomicCAS(addr, old, new) != old) { old = *addr; new = max(old, x); } } The idea is: ...

Looking back on my first semester at CMU, I wanted to share my thoughts and experiences with the courses I took. This might be helpful for future students planning their schedules. This semester I took 4 courses. The workload was intense but manageable with good time management. Here’s my breakdown: 18-613: Introduction to Computer Systems While the famous CSAPP course has been extensively reviewed and is taught at many universities, here’s my personal perspective on the CMU experience. ...