Talk 11: Nilesh Mahajan

[cgswords]

Put the communication on the slides!

[ccshan]

Watch where you're pointing with the laser pointer and be intentional!

[cgswords]

Kanor's syntax is hard to read for me. Is it possible to abstract over it maybe, or give pictoral explainations of these (clearly powerful) language constructs?

[samth]

Pictures!

[ccshan]

At the "Kanor Equivalent" slide I wonder whether the processing of sender and receiver pairs takes O(n^2) rather than O(n) time using Kanor, where n is the number of processors.

[ccshan]

Please enlarge the code snippets (perhaps inserting more line breaks)

[ccshan]

Why "Allgatherv" in the slide title?

[cgswords]

Also, please define the keywords? What does _at_ do? Maybe it does a lot of things?

[samth]

Showing the "formal syntax" is rarely useful -- show examples instead.

[ccshan]

I suspect that any point you try to make using a Formal Syntax slide is better made by example without showing any BNF production.

[samth]

@ccshan Jinx.

[cgswords]

Yes, that. Spend time on smaller examples before diving in, leading us through the language features we need to know before building the big ones.

[cgswords]

@samth I nearly typed "and the thing Sam is about to post about not showing the formal definition" ;)

[cgswords]

What guarantees do we have that communcation will always succeed?

[cgswords]

"Better than what"? You describe these properties and then say we can do better at runtime, but it's hard to tell what you're trying to improve there.

[cgswords]

Does the programmer define the communication knowledge of their application? Or is this a thing that crops up based on how you write the program, to be used as a general classification technique?

[cgswords]

For your algorithm, it may be better to gave two computation graphs, one where it holds and one where it doesn't, and talk through the algorithm with them, demonstrating how one fails and one succeeds.

[cgswords]

What sorts of compiler support are you shooting for? Why is it a problem?

[cgswords]

Color key for the tests, and maybe use fewer graphs.

[samth]

Have a thank you slide that includes your main points so that it's up during the question period.

[samth]

Feedback

• Dan: avoid reading your slides
• Sam: limit yourself to 5 bullets for the whole talk -- use pictures instead.
• Ken: for each section, write down for yourself what your communication goal is for that section

[ccshan]

• Dan: Not having text on your slides helps you not read them.
• Cam: Not reading your slides helps you appear competent.