Create README.md

README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,55 @@
+![University of Lincoln](http://thelincolnite.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/new_uni_crest.jpg "University of Lincoln")
+----------
+
+# CMP3110M Parallel Computing, Assessment Item 1
+Your task is to develop a simple statistical tool for analysing historical weather records from
+Lincolnshire. The provided data files include records of air temperature collected over a period of
+more than 80 years from five weather stations in Lincolnshire: Barkston Heath, Scampton,
+Waddington, Cranwell and Coningsby. Your tool should be able to load the provided dataset and
+perform statistical summaries of temperature including the min, max and average values, and standard
+deviation. The provided summaries should be performed on the entire dataset regardless their
+acquisition time and location. For additional credit, you can also consider the median statistic and its
+1st and 3rd quartiles (i.e. 25th and 75th percentiles) which will require a development of a suitable
+sorting algorithm.
+
+Due to the large amount of data (i.e. 1.8 million records), all statistical calculations shall be performed
+on parallel hardware and implemented by a parallel software component written in OpenCL. Your tool
+should also report memory transfer, kernel execution and total program execution times for
+performance assessment. Further credit will be given for additional optimisation strategies which
+target the parallel performance of the tool. In such a case, your program should run and display
+execution times for different variants of your algorithm. Your basic implementation can assume
+temperature values expressed as integers and skip all parts after a decimal point. For additional credit,
+you should also consider the exact temperature values and their corresponding statistics.
+
+You can base your code on the material provided during workshop sessions, but you are not allowed to
+use any existing parallel libraries (e.g. Boost.Compute). To help you with code development, a shorter
+dataset is also provided which is 100 times smaller. The original file is called
+“weather_lincolnshire.txt” and the short dataset is “weather_lincolnshire_short.txt”. More details
+about the file format are included in the “readme.txt” file. The data files are provided on Blackboard
+together with this description document in a file “temp_lincolnshire_datasets.zip”. The output results
+and performance measures should be reported in a console window in a clear and readable format. All
+reading and displaying operations should be provided by the host code.
+
+The main assessment criteria for this task are related to the correctness of the developed algorithms
+and effectiveness of optimisation strategies. The code should be well commented and clearly structured into functional blocks.
+
+----------
+
+
+## Objectives
+
+
+* [LO1] demonstrate practical skills in applying parallel algorithms for solving computational
+problems;
+* [LO3] analyse parallel architectures as a means to provide solutions to complex computational
+problems.
+
+----------
+
+
+## License
+
+The program is licenced under [GPL Version 2.0](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html). The source is freely available to use, compile and modify.
+
+
+----------