Master Thesis

by Damien Engels

This is the source for the final report of my master's thesis at EPFL. In the report, I present the work I have done over 6 months at the Pervasive Parallelism Lab (PPL) in Stanford in conjunction with the Programming Methods Laboratory (LAMP) at EPFL.

Usage

Warning: Only runs on MacOS. There is no reason why you could not use it on another platform, but I did not bother adding support. If you want to use it, you'll have to figure it out yourself.

Install dependencies

The tools needed to compile the report are:

• pandoc
• latex
• markdown-spellchecker (non-essential)
• fswatch (non-essential)

You can install all those tools by running the following script that will check which dependencies are missing and install them for you:

bash> ./install.sh

Build the report

To generate a pdf from the sources, run the following script:

bash> ./build.sh

The resulting file can be found in build/thesis.pdf. By default the script creates a resulting document in pdf format without failing on spellcheck errors, but the scripts also supports the following options:

• --spellcheck: run the spellchecker in interactive mode to fix spelling mistakes
• --no-spellcheck: don't warn about spelling mistakes
• --open: open the resulting document
• --pdf: output pdf document (default)
• --tex: output latex document
• --docx: output word document (does not include title page)

If you want the report to be generated each time the source changes, you can run:

bash> ./auto.sh

Writing

The report is written using pandoc's version of Markdown (http://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#pandocs-markdown).

The sources can be found in the src folder.

Al the dynamic figures (graphs, plots) are generated using markdown-tech.

Design

The project is structured as follows:

• src
  • *.md
  • biblio.bib
• images
• templates
  • break-sections.tex
  • computer.csl
  • titlepage.tex

All of the files are located in the src folder. They have to be ordered by name, so they are all prefixed with their respective section number. The bibliography can be found in src/biblio.bib and is in standard bibtex format. All of the images or contained in the images subfolder.

The templates folder contains the latex templates that are included before generating the pdf. Theses include a template that makes sure a new page is allocated every time a section starts as well as the template that creates the title page. templates/computer.csl defines the citation style in the resulting document.

Bugs

Pandoc does not like backslashes in image urls, so for now the plots are not generated using markdown-tech, but have their separate compilation folder.