Introduction to BME

class: first semester, 2016.

lecturer: Prabhas Chongstitvatana,
prabhas at chula dot ac dot th
office Engineering building 4, floor 18, room 13, tel 022186982

previous classes:  2014   2013

topic:

Modern computer systems


I will discuss three topics:
1)  the change of behaviour in using computers
2)  the change in computer systems
3)  high performance computing and quantum computers

Mobile
  talk to computers
  Internet of Things

Clouds
  Amazon Web Service
  Microsoft Azure

High performance
  top500.org
  Google Quantum AI lab
  The report of speedup of D-wave x2 machines

You can read about quantum computers in my talk at JCSSE, July 2016.  Quantum Computing, keynote speech at Int Joint Conf on Computer Science and Software Engineering (JCSSE), 13-15 July, 2016, Khon Khan, Thailand.

Assignment

Please write two or three pages discussing the following topics.  You can choose two out of four topics.

1)  modern interface -- It is the trend of this year.  Every IT companies talk about using "conversational UI" in order to promote better interface in machine-to-machine communication (also applicable to human-to-machine).  Write an essay about it.  Example is the chatbot.

2)  how to use clouds -- There are many cloud services. You can "create" a PC (as a virtual machine) from those services.  The most populars are Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.  Read about them and try them out from their websites. You should look into how to create a PC for your own use.  Write a report about it. You don't need to "really" pay for the service, you just need to read some tutorial and have a look to make sure what it is really about.

3)  supercomputing --  Read about them from top500.org.  The latest trend is about energy efficiency.  Write a report about the competitiveness of the nations that build those machines:  Who was doing what, when, and why.

4)  quantum computers --  One possible future of super-fast computer is Quantum computers. There is no general purpose quantum computers yet. Read about Google/NASA experiment with D-wave x2 machine and write a report about it.

Please submit your report to me at  prabhas@chula.ac.th  not later than 14 October 2016.  After reading your reports, I will email you one more question that you should investigate and write the answer to me in a day or two.  That question will be a deeper discussion about some specific topic related to modern computing.

Tools

I mentioned the Microsoft Academic Alliance with our Faculty of Engineering.  Here is the link.  I don't know how you request an account.  But you can always contact the IT department of the faculty.

Microsoft Imagine

Good luck, hope you enjoy the session.


Prabhas Chongstitvatana
last update 24 September 2016