Hi,
Since Nvidia launched Udacity CS344: Intro to Parallel Programming | NVIDIA Developer, i was trying to attend the exam.
But, here in France, i was answered by one the prometrics’ center that the exam is in Beta test and isn’t available now (and even may never be really commercialised…)
Does anyone have any information about this certification programm?
Thanks
I took the exam on Jan 24th and am stilllllllll waiting for the results…
Gosh…NVIDIA, Do something to speed up your processes…
Well I took my exam on February 11th if I remember properly, and still waiting for results as well.
I understand the exam was on beta phase, so I expected some delays, but at least they could provide some news/hints about the time frame.
Don you think some questions are becoming irrelevant with CUDA 4.0RC?
They could involve us a bit more in the process of fine-tuning the exam, I have quite some feedback to rpovide about it…
Best Regards,
Please look at next post…(Result of two clicks…)
When contacted they said they are encountering delays and readily acknowledged that the delay was un-acceptable.
But still no timeframes…
If they have lost the data, I think they should re-conduct the exam and re-fund half of the money.
Man… I am still waiting…
The most important feedback that I want to give them:
Dont give 10 choices to a single objective question and then ask to tick-mark everything that is appropriate and partial-answers will not be considered…
Man…It takes so much time just looking at the options…
I sent a email March 23th to certification@nvidia.com (found on the web page) to ask some news and precisions on why i am not able to pass the exam in France (I suppose you both live in USA?).
I haven’t got any answer back yet…
Yeah, certification@nvidia.com is notoriously silent… I also CC another NV employee whom I got connected with.
That employee replies back promptly.
btw, I live in India.
Nope, I took my exam in Spain, probbly first person to take it in the whole country though :-P
The guys at the Prometric test center had never heard of the exam before…
I agree with Sarnath, some questions looked like they have merged several questions into one, in that case the chances of getting it wrong increase significantly as you need to amrk all the correct answers, I prefer several questions about the same issue.
Some other certification exams have 60 to 70 questions which I think is better.
Personally I was expecting that being among the first takers of the exam would bring all sorts of problems, I realize that creating a certification exam is a very complicated task, specially to make it fair. I teach at an university and after 4 years I feel I’m beginning to grade my students properly.
I’ve been told exam results will be available soon, apparently they finished grading the exams…
Best Regards,
Vincent,
Thanks for sharing this info.
Were you given access to programming guide?
Were you able to complete both the programming assignments?
I was not given access to pg…I completed one…and close to complete the second…
But ran out of time…I hope I dont run out of luck ;-)
Waiting for the grades… Hmm…So long a wait.
I had some trouble with the programming assignments as well, I run out of time for the second one after chasing a silly bug in the first one for way too long.
I think the programming guide was available, I don’t remember needing to look it up so I can’t say for certain…
What do you think of the material available to prepare the exam?, how did you prepare it?..
Best Regards,
Oops… Sorry to know that… BUt I guess that will be common… The buttons for running the program did not work for me. I had to go with some other buttons… Wasted around 20 mins on that…
As far as preps, I just read the programming guide, best practices guide and noted down some subtle points… like: cudaMemcpyDeviceToDevice can be asynchronous…and some other copies are async if size is < 64KB etc… Another area was coalescing and the offsets…And there were lot of questions to my delight ;-)
Because, I knew the general concepts… But I was wary that they may ask some really fastidious questions just to piss you off…
But then, I think the questions they asked in the exam were fair enough. Just that they had too many options and sometimes it was like aptitude test… You know… Requiring to know that the GCD beteen (16,32) and (3) is one…So you choose your strides correctly etc…
To all those who preceed me on this path, Hail !!
I was planning to take this test and the certification in April 2011 but have been delayed and only in May shall I be able to take the test. Has anybody who has given the test got the ‘certificate’ in their hand ? If I go by Sarnath’s timeline its nearly 3 months and 2 weeks to know the results !!
What does the test involve ? "Buttons for running the program … " what is this ?? A MCQ followed by the programming test ? What was time duration for programming test ?
I am also curious about how will the exam structured now that we have CUDA 4.0 ?
Ashish.
I was told we will very soon (next week?) receive the grade of the exam.
I took the exam in early February so memory is fading… :-P
I think it was one hour multi-choice test and two programming assignment for which you have 2 hours, in the assignments you submit the code and it is compiled and run at nvidia (in a tesla card), you get instant feedback but debugging in those environments is challenging at best, anyway the assignments are not complex and they provide you with the “serial code” of the function, you just have to write a kernel that performs the same task. My advice here is first get the simplest version up and running, then you can worry about optimizing the code…I did the opposite and spent most of the time trying to hunt bugs in my code…so play safe and then if you have time explore other possibilities with pre-fectching, loop unrolling shared memory etc etc
I do think that CUDA 4.0 may render irrelevant some of the questions I had during the test but that is natural considering the breathtaking speed of development of CUDA. You should ask first what version of CUDA you are going to be examined with.
All things considered is a great thing to do…a certification program is a critical piece in order to expand the technology beyond academia and research centers and into the private sector, it helps to create a demand for professionals in that area as it provides with objective qualifications… I encourage everyone to take it.
Just be aware that is a very very new certification…there are always “growing pains” and the pioneers in taking the exam will always face problems and challenges until the fine tune the certification program.
Best of luck,
Vicen
Hi,
Any new developments on certification for anybody ? Got a few "Congratulations !’ emails ? Did any one receive the grades, certificates etc ? Its May end and if Jan and Feb ones are still awaiting … External Image Enlighten !!
NV’s processes are not as fast as their processors… Still waiting…Slightly my hopes are fading…I think I will never get graded…
Nope… total silence…and yes is way past the time they told me we would get the results…
maybe they are adapting the certification program to CUDA 4.0?
Nobody has ever got the grades?..
Hi everyone,
I am also planning to take cuda ceertification very soon. Should I wait till they regularize their process of generating results? Even I didn’t get any reply for my several queries from mail-id certification@nvidia.com. Looks like nobody is monitoring the mails. Are they at least giving the scores of multiple choice questions instantly when you are done with the exam? Any pass percentage mentioned anywhere during the online exam? Which grades can be treated as pass/fail? Please let me know if you have got any of these information while you took the exam.
Thanks in advance.
I’ve had zero news so far, no marks for the whole exam or any of its parts. Either they have suspended the certification program or they are updating it to cover CUDA 4.0, maybe you won’t be able to take the exam for some time, I don’t know, we have no information whatsoever.
I’m usually very supportive of certification programs for various reasons, but in this case the silence is absolute, as long as I know no one has obtains any grades or pass/fail communication, and if nobody answers the certification@nvidia.com (not even a paltry “we’ll get back to you”) I very much suspect the certification program is either dead or frozen in carbonite.
As things are now you don’t even know the version of CUDA the exam is about (the 3.x or 4.0?), in top of that you have to pay a certain amount of money to get the chance of doing an exam and have the privilege of waiting for months for a result (in my case 5 and counting…)
We can be very understanding about this certification program in its infancy, but a bit more communication would be great…
We even have some feedback if they wanted it…although my memory of the exams starts to fade…maybe it never happened in the first place… :-P
Guys,
AMD will hopefully start OpenCL certification sometime…
I think we should all go and take that exam…
By the time NVIDIA yawns its way out of the slumber, we will all be off to AMD…
I hope we all can ask for a refund along with penalty charges from NVIDIA for being irresponsive (and irresponsible).
