Teaching and learning resources • Re: Advent of Code 2023

Here it is October 2024 and I'm wondering how to make Advent 2024 more fun. My theory is doing all the programs in Julia last year--useful since I'm teaching a course with Julia--made the puzzles too similar to work.

I asked Fido for ideas. Tail wagging, the chair of the fun and hosting committee referred me to a recent blog by Jeff Geerling

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/ ... -4k-gaming

and suggested solving the Advent 2024 puzzles on a Pi-connected GPU.

Noting that dogs seem to have strange ideas of fun, I read read the blog and

One downside to the Polaris generation AMD graphics cards is ROCm support was dropped years ago, so using the RX 460 for compute is a bit tricky.

After careful consideration the dog developer proposed a backup plan: If ROCm doesn't work then hosting will provide a dog treat for each puzzle solved.

I was about to fall asleep but loud barking ended that plan. I opened the door and there was Fido tail innocently wagging with a webpage open on the system console.

https://chapel-lang.org/

After mentioning one really shouldn't browse the web while logged in as root, I understood an alternative to GPU computing that saves the hosting budget is the Chapel parallel programming language. Chapel has one-sided communication using a partitioned global address space similar to Fortran coarrays but without the Fortran.

It might even run on the super-cheap computing cluster for learning.

viewtopic.php?p=1247739#p1247739

More importantly, Chapel appears suitable for the first 12 days of Advent of Code.

https://chapel-lang.org/blog/series/adv ... code-2022/

Statistics: Posted by ejolson — Wed Nov 06, 2024 6:25 am

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