Senior COSC units offered in the School of Physics

These units provide a treatment of interdisciplinary computational science at the Senior level. They are also core Senior units in the computational science major (for more information, see COSC: How to choose your units). The Advanced versions of the units cover similar material but at a greater depth, including more difficult problems and some more sophisticated programming techniques.

COSC 3011 and 3911 (Advanced)
   Scientific Computing 		WebCT

Offered in Semester:   1
Credit Points:     6

This unit of study provides a Senior-level treatment of scientific problem solving using computers. Students will understand and apply a wide range of numerical schemes for solving ordinary and partial differential equations. Linear algebra is used to provide detailed insight into stability analysis, relaxation methods, and implicit integration. A variety of scientific problems are considered, including planetary motion, population demographics, neutron criticality, traffic flow and quantum mechanics. All coding is performed with MATLAB, and basic programming experience is assumed.

Prerequisites: 12 credit points chosen from Junior Mathematics and Statistics, 12 credit points of Intermediate units in Science subject areas. For COSC 3901 the Intermediate Science units must be at a credit level.

COSC 3012 and 3912 (Advanced)
  Parallel Computing & Visualisation 		WebCT

Offered in Semester:   2
Credit Points:     6

The first half of the course considers Parallel Computing on distributed and shared memory architectures. Students learn the concepts of distributed-memory programming using the Message Passing Interface (MPI), while shared-memory programming is presented using OpenMP. Concepts covered include scalability, communication overheads, deadlocks, domain decomposition and incremental parallelism. Basic programming ability in Fortran or C (or equivalent) is assumed. The second half of this course considers Scientific Visualisation as a tool for analysing, interpreting and communicating multi-dimensional numerical data. Students learn the principles and practice of Scientific Visualisation in the context of OpenDX, the open-source Data Explorer package developed by IBM. No previous experience is required, and the object-oriented visual programming environment is taught in the laboratory sessions.

Prerequisites: 12 credit points chosen from Junior Mathematics and Statistics, 12 credit points of Intermediate units in Science subject areas. For COSC 3912 the Intermediate Science units must be at a credit level.

Want to know more?

Questions about computational science should be directed to m.wheatland (at) physics.usyd.edu.au

For more general questions, you can also contact the School of Physics Prospective Student Adviser (email student_adviser@physics.usyd.edu.au).

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Last modified on 8 December, 2006.
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