C – Patrick Buhagiar

The exam timetabling problem is a classic real life problem faced by all education institutions. When given a period of time, it is required to allocate all exams into specific timeslots without creating any collisions. There are many ways of implementing an exam timetabling algorithm, however one efficient way is to implement a Monte Carlo optimized Hyper-Heuristic algorithm. Hyper heuristics can be considered a type of nearest neighbour (or Greedy) algorithm with the only difference being that it seeks to automate the selecting process through machine learning.

Check out my GitHub for the implementation.

We are first required to define the necessary parameters and present them as a tuple in order to solve this algorithm. These are:

E → The set of events
I → The domain
K → Constraints

E → Set of Events

In this case, the set of events are examinations. In the classic exam timetabling problem, for each exam we are required to define the set of all students which need to sit for the exam. Since this is a simple implementation, it is assumed that students in the same course do not have electives, therefore each student in the same course will sit for the same exam. In the programming implementation, each exam will list which courses are to sit for the exam.
A Course class and Exam class were created. The course class for this implementation contains the course name and number of students. The exam class on the other hand contains a list of courses that are to sit for the exam and the exam code.

Continue reading “Monte Carlo Optimization: Exam Timetabling” →

The aim of this assignment was to implement an API which provides a number of calls allowing processes to memory map sections of a file located on a remote machine. Processes can then read and write to this memory area using the provided calls, with changes being propagated to the remote ﬁle by the library. Multiple processes from multiple client machines should be able to access and modify the same ﬁle on a remote machine. This was implemented in C on Ubuntu. Check out my Github for the full implementation.

REQUIREMENTS

The requirements consisted of a Client-Server model with:

The server having the ability to open a number of files (or section of files) on the machine using a file descriptor, and storing them in memory.
The client having the ability to demand that the server maps a particular file (or section of file) to memory.
The client having the ability to demand that the server unmaps a particular file (or section of a file) from memory.
The client having the ability to demand a part of the memory from the server.
The client having the ability to alter a part of the memory from the server.

Implementation

Continue reading “Remote File Memory Mapping” →