The workshop started with a review session of Day 3, which included topics like BCCD, CPU/GPGPU, and Linux commands.
Then, Aaron taught a session explaining other useful and interesting Linux commands such as "top", "ping", and a long "for" loop for printing a calendar.
Next, Mobeen taught a session explaining weak scaling, strong scaling, and how communication has an affect on run-time as the number of processors and/or problem size increases. After this, there was an exercise exploring scaling using the GalaxSee program. The first portion of the class ended with a discussion of "race conditions", in which two computers try to do the same thing in shared memory.
After the break, Aaron presented the "Game of Life" program and explained the terms "cellular automaton" and "emergent behavior", the rules of the Game, and how it can be used to model things in biology and mathematics. The students played around with Game of Life, adjusting the number of rows and columns in the grid, as well as the number of time steps and number of processors.
The day ended with a discussion of the communication patterns in "Game of Life" followed by daily reflections.