The students began the day by discussing the storage hierarchy; they learned about how the process of storing data becomes faster and more expensive as it gets closer to the central processing unit where work gets done. They learned the significance of this in writing both parallel and serial code. Using pictures, Andrew Fitz Gibbon, or Fitz, explained in detail the concept of a multicore processor, a processor with multiple "cores" or units that actually do the work.
Then the students booted their computers into the Bootable Cluster CD (BCCD), and made their computers into an impromptu cluster. Since many of the students did not have a background in C, the language of most high-performance parallel computing, they spent the rest of the class on the BCCD writing a Reimann sum program to learn the basics.