Welcome to the Course!

This is a course about writing high-performance, high-quality software for scientific and engineering applications. What we learn in this course has wide applicability both within scientific computing and in other fields that rely on high-performance or low-latency software (e.g., finance, games, telecom, AV processing, etc.).

To make the most of the available hardware, one needs to program "close to the metal." C++ gives us the capability to get to this level, but the language by itself is not enough. We must also understand some aspects of computer hardware and operating systems. This semester will provide a survey of some of the most important topics from these subjects as they pertain to writing optimized scientific software.

C++ is an evolving language, with its modern "era" starting in 2011. Since then, the language has been updated on a three-year cycle, most recently with C++23 (C++26 is in the final stages of approval). The aim of this course is to present a "C++-first" (i.e., not C) modern treatment of the language. We will start with C++ from scratch, so no prior knowledge in the language (or for that matter, C) is required. Of course, having some programming experience, for example from another course, is helpful.

Course registration

Answers to administrative questions, for example course registration, application to examinations, re-examinations and similar, can be found at the Student desk offices. You can contact the Student Office via email: studentoffice@math.kth.se. In particular, to maintain access to the course you must register by the deadline, see Course registration.

Course content

Assignments

This course has four mandatory programming assignments that can be done in groups of at most two students. The assignments also contain theoretical parts related to the material. Information about each assignment will be made available during the course, typically by an introduction to the scientific application during the lectures.

Assignment due dates
Assignment	Due date	Help session
Optional gridding assignment	Tue, Sep 8, 19:00	Wed, Sep 9, 13-15
Assignment 1	Thu, Oct 1, 19:00	Fri, Sep 25
Assignment 2	Fri, Oct 30, 19:00	Wed, Oct 28
Assignment 3	Wed, Nov 25, 19:00	TBD
Assignment 4	Tue, Dec 22, 19:00	TBD

As a matter of KTH policy, all students handing in an assignment are responsible for its full contents (including if the assignment has been completed in a group) and for following all the course policies, including the AI policy (see more info later on this page). To ensure compliance with this, we may ask some of you to come present your assignments orally. Note! This does not mean that we a priori believe that you not followed the policy, you may simply have been randomly selected as part of this effort.

Note that, if you have been selected for an oral presentation, you will need to complete it successfully to receive a passing grade on the assignment. You do not have to prepare anything for the presentation, we will just ask some questions.

Exam

For previously given exams, see Exam Info.

Grades

For students taking SF2565:

The course consists of two components, PRO1 and TEN1. To pass the course, PRO1 must be completed with a P grade and TEN1 has to be completed with at least a grade E.

PRO1 (P/F)
- There will be four assignments to be completed at home. Each assignment is graded on a scale 0-10. Late assignments will be accepted at a 50% penalty the first week past the due date. After this, you are allowed to hand in the assignment for completion, but no bonus points for the exam will be given (see below). To pass PRO1, at least 5 points on each assignment (before deductions) is required. Each take-home assignment gives up to 1 bonus point on the exam (score * 0.1)
TEN1 (A-F) - final exam 40 pts. Preliminary point cut-offs for different grades are as follows:

A: 34 (85%)
B: 30 (75%)
C: 26 (65%)
D: 22 (55%)
E: 18 (45%)
Fx: 16 (40%)
F: <16

Students receiving an Fx grade will be given a chance to raise their grade to an E.

For more info and past exams, see Exam info.

Plus-ing

Plus-ing (retaking the exam for a higher grade if you have already passed) is allowed. However, any bonus points accumulated from the assignments during HT26 will be valid only for the HT26 exam and re-exam. Please reach out to the Student Office for info on how to register, etc..

For students taking FSF3565:

The course is graded P/F. For a passing grade, the home assignments and project must be completed to a satisfactory level (at least 7/10 points on each assignment, and a passing grade on the project), and a grade of at least C is required on the final exam. The exam for FSF3565 is given as a take-home exam.

AI Policy (Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, Copilot, Cursor, etc.)

All use of generative AI is prohibited in the course's examination and graded assignments. Please familiarize yourself with the course AI policy as it is your responsibility to make sure you follow it.

Communication and groups

You can find all announcements posted via Announcements.

Under the People tab, you can find the groups you are a part of in this course.

Contact information

Instructor: Björn Wehlin. Email: bwehlin@kth.se. Office: 3726 (Lindstedtsvägen 25, Floor 7). Tel: 08-790 7220
TA: Sebastian Myrbäck. Email: smyrback@kth.se.
Examiner: Katarina Gustavsson. Email: katg@kth.se.

Emails from students are most welcome: please allow us at least 48 hours to respond. I always try to respond well before that but it may sometimes not be possible. This means that last-minute emails about assignments or similar might go unanswered before the relevant deadline has passed—try to do things a bit in advance so that you have enough time to get your questions answered.

Student Representative

Yann Thomas Buchy: buchy@kth.se

Support for Students with Disabilities

Students with disabilities may have the right to certain compensatory support, for example during examination. This is centrally coordinated at KTH by Funka; please contact Funka at funka@kth.se for information about the support they can offer.

Office Hours

Office hours are scheduled on Wednesdays from 11:00-12:00. Please give me a call at +4687907220 or send an email (bwehlin@kth.se) when you arrive to the math department (Lindstedtsvägen 25) and I will let you know where to go (which may vary depending on the week).

Office hours are meant as an informal setting where you as students in the course can come and discuss any questions you may have on the course material, homework, C++ or software engineering in general, etc.. This hour is dedicated to you, so you should not feel like you're bothering anyone by showing up (on the contrary!) or that you must have some "perfect question" in mind before coming.

Literature

The main reference for this course is: Gottschling, P. "Discovering Modern C++" (2nd ed). Addison-Wesley Professional, 2021. ISBN 978-0-13-667764-2 . Some additional material will be posted during the course.
For some low-level aspects, we will read sections of:
- Eijkhout, V., Chow E., and van de Geijn R. "The Science of Computing," 2022. Freely available online (https://github.com/VictorEijkhout/TheArtofHPC_pdfs/blob/main/vol1/EijkhoutIntroToHPC.pdf) or here.
- Matthews, S. J., Newhall, T., & Webb, K. C. "Dive Into Systems: A Gentle Introduction to Computer Systems" No Starch Press, 2022. Freely available online (https://diveintosystems.org/)
Additional references:
- Lippman, S.B., Lajoie, J., Moo, B.E. "C++ Primer" (5th ed.). Addison-Wesley, 2013
- Josuttis, N. M. "The C++ standard library: a tutorial and reference" (2nd ed). Addison-Wesley, 2012.
- Meyers, S. "Effective C++: 55 specific ways to improve your programs and designs." Pearson Education, 2005.
- Meyers, S. "Effective modern C++: 42 specific ways to improve your use of C++ 11 and C++ 14." O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2014.
- Goldberg, D. "What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic." ACM computing surveys (CSUR) 23.1 (1991): 5-48.
- Bryant, R.E., O’Hallaron, D.R. "Computer systems: a programmer’s perspective" (3rd ed). Pearson Education, 2016.

Lecture plan

Note! This lecture plan is tentative and there may be changes during the semester. The assigned reading is from Gottschling unless otherwise specified.

Room and time info is added for convenience. Please always double check with your official KTH schedule.

Tentative lecture plan
Week	Date	Topics	Reading
1	Mon, Aug 24 - Lecture 15-17 in room Q31 Slides	Intro to the course and C++ Basic syntax and control flow Compiling and running programs	1.1-1.5 1.9
	Wed, Aug 26 - Lecture 15-17 in room Q33 Slides	Basic syntax and control flow I/O Pointers and references	1.6-1.7 1.8 (skip 1.8.3 smart pointers)
	Thu, Aug 27 - Computer Lab 10-12 in computer hall Spelhallen	Environment setup CMake Compiling and running programs	Lab instructions
2	Wed, Sep 2 - Lecture 15-17 in room W42 Whiteboard	Structured grid generation	Grid generation notes
3	Mon, Sep 7 - Lecture 13-15 in room U31 Slides	Intro to classes Operator overloading I/O intro (Good time to start working on HW1 after this lecture.)	2.1-2.3.1.1 2.6-2.7
3	Wed, Sep 9 - Exercise 13-15 in room U61	Exercises 2.2, 2.3, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.5 and 3.8 from the notes on grid generation
4	Wed, Sep 16 - Lecture 15-17 in room Q34 Slides Whiteboard	I/O, files, streams Error handling Virtual and physical memory	Matthews et al. 13.3 (stop after "Page Tables for Virtual-to-Physical Page Mapping")
5	Wed, Sep 23 - Lecture 15-17 in room Q36 Whiteboard Slides	Stack and heap Resources	Matthews et al. 2-2.5 2.3-2.5
5	Fri, Sep 25 - Computer Lab 15-17 in computer hall Röd	Homework 1 help session Help queue
6	Mon, Sep 28 - Lecture 15-17 in room Q34 Slides	Ownership, resource management, RAII Copy/move Rule of zero/three/five Smart pointers	Notes on resource management
6	Thu, Oct 1 - Lecture 10-12 in room K1 Slides	Finish resource management Object-oriented programming (OOP) Polymorphism Liskov substitution principle (Good time to start working on HW2 after this lecture.)	6.1-6.4
7	Tue, Oct 6 - Computer Lab 12-14 in computer hall Sporthallen	Static and runtime analysis	Lab instructions
7	Wed Oct 7 - Lecture 15-17 in room Q34 Slides	Coupling and cohesion Integer representation Floating point numbers	Eijkhout Ch 3 (3.7, 3.8 cursory)
	Break
8	Mon Oct 26 - Lecture 13-15 in room Q34	Floating point numbers II Generic programming Templates	3.1-3.9
8	Wed Oct 28 - Computer Lab 15-17 in computer lab Brun	Homework 2 help session
9	Mon Nov 2 - Lecture 15-17 in room W38	Standard Template Library (STL) QuadTrees (for Assignment 3)	4.1-4.5 (skip 4.2.2)
	Fri Nov 6 - Lecture 10-12 in room Q36
	Fri Nov 6 - Computer Lab 13-15 in computer lab Sporthallen
10	Mon Nov 9 - Lecture 15-17 in room Q33
11	Wed Nov 18 - Lecture 15-17 in room W43
11	Fri Nov 20 - Computer Lab 15-17 in computer lab Röd
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Additional resources

IDEs/Editors

There are many IDEs and text editors with support for C++, both commercial and open source. We will primarily use CLion (free for non-commercial use) during the course.

It is highly recommended *not* to use VS Code since this requires a lot of configuration on the user's part for C++ (even if you may get this going fairly easily in the beginning, you may find that it becomes more demanding to get everything to work as the course progresses). Note that VS Code and Microsoft Visual Studio are not the same! The latter is has much better support for C++ out of the box and can be used for the entire course without issue (although you may need to use the Linux computers in the computer halls during the labs at some points).

Useful (external) websites

cppreference.com - C++ (and C) reference
Compiler Explorer by Matt Godbolt - shows assembly output from a wide variety of compilers
C++ Insights by Andreas Fertig - gives "behind-the-scenes" views of code
QuickBench by Fred Tingaud - microbenchmarking tool
IEEE754 Converter by H. Schmidt - float/IEEE 754 converter
C++ Core Guidelines edited by Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter - best practices guidelines for C++