Scientific Computing Skills

PH2150A Team Project Home Page

Autumn term, 2002

 

  Royal Holloway, University of London


Glen Cowan, office: W262, phone: (01784) 44 3452, e-mail: g.cowan@rhbnc.ac.uk

Your assignment: Your team of three or four people will be given a project to work on, and you will complete a single written report to be turned in at the end of the module. In addition to this, each member should be recording work in his or her lab notebook, which will also be turned in at the end of the module.

Dates to remember:

Thursday 12 December, 2002, 14:00 for the oral presentations in T118 (approx.15 minutes) by one member of each team;

Friday 13 December, 2002, all written material (project report and lab notebooks) due.

The aims of this module include:

learning about numerical methods and practicing your computing skills by applying these methods;
developing your ability to solve a problem as part of a team;
developing report writing and presentation skills.
You are encouraged to explore alternative methods of solution and variations of your assigned task beyond what is requested explicitly in the project description.

The written report should include a discussion of the nature of the problem, the algorithms you are using for its solution, and how these have been implemented. Your code should be included as an appendix. Short segments of code necessary for explaining how you implemented the algorithms should be included in the body of the report. You should include a discussion of the results with illustrative plots, and a discussion of the limitations and possible extensions of the methods used. Grammar, spelling, style and clarity of explanation will play an important role in the assessment.

Your lab notebooks should include notes on how your part of the project fits into the overall picture (its "boundary conditions"), your strategy for implementing the code (e.g. written in pseudo-code), and notes on problems encountered in programming and how they were solved.

The oral presentation: a member of each team should be chosen to give a 15 minute presentation on Thursday 13 December at 14:00. You are encouraged to use PowerPoint and the lab's data projector; colour transparencies are another option. The presentation should include a brief description of the your computing problem, the methods considered and chosen, results, and a discussion of how the project could be extended and improved.

Assessment: written report: 50%, lab notebook: 35%, oral presentation: 15%. The nominal policy is that the mark for the written report and oral presentation will be shared equally among the team members. Adjustments will be made, however, if some team members have not made a sufficient effort to contribute.

Descriptions of the projects:

Solving the Laplace equation using the relaxation method: ps, pdf
Computing planetary motion with the Runge-Kutta method: ps, pdf
Motion of a pendulum with the Runge-Kutta method: ps, pdf
Projectile motion (numerical minimization and the method of least squares): ps, pdf
Optical aberrations of spherical and paraoblic mirrors (ray tracing): ps, pdf

Some additional projects (for your interest):

Decay of radioactive nuclei (warm-up exercise for solution of differential equations) ps, pdf
X-ray simulation with the Monte Carlo method: ps, pdf
Least squares fit of a polynomial: ps, pdf. Data file ls_data.dat.

Each team should decide on:

a team coordinator;
a report editor;
a speaker for the oral presentation.
Remember that all team members should participate in preparing the report and oral presentation, as well as working on the computing task itself.


Glen Cowan