COSC3500 High-Performance Computing (University of Queensland): rated 4.5/5 overall across 6 reviews collected on UQ Wall.
COSC3500 is a University of Queensland course taught by the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology in Computational Science. This page brings together its handbook details and what UQ students say about it.
Review data updated 2026-10-24.
Chinese title: 高性能计算
Type: undergraduate
Credit points: 2
Subject area: Computational Science
Faculty: Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology
Level: Undergraduate Level 3
Handbook year: 2026
This course teaches the methods and technology of high-performance computing. Primarily a project-based course, students select a scientific model they are interested in parallelising and then apply some or all of the techniques of vectorisation (SIMD, AVX), threading (MIMD, openMP), GPU programming (CUDA), and/or cluster computing (MPI) to accelerate their computation.
COSC3500 has 6 scored reviews: overall 4.5/5 (all out of 5; higher difficulty means harder).
Sources: 6 Reddit comments that an AI model judged to be reviewing this course (average would-recommend 4.5/5).
On Reddit: "Honestly I'd say most of the best courses I've taken are some of the most notoriously difficult ones. CSSE2310, PHYS3051, MATH3204, ... Operations Research and Mathematical Planning's (MATH3202) pretty awesome and isnt as challenging as the above. High Performance Computing (COS…"
On Reddit: "I enjoyed COSC3500, if you like building models and algorithms and seeing programming from a scientific background (as opposed to the engineering-based approach in SE) then you'll like it. You also get access to the HPC clusters at UQ to run your project on them."
The course panel on UQ Wall shows every review and discussion in full.
Q: Is COSC3500 worth taking?
A: Averaged over 6 reviews: overall 4.5/5.
Q: Which faculty teaches COSC3500, and when is it offered?
A: COSC3500 is taught by the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology. Check the official handbook for the current year.
UQ Wall is an independent student community and is not affiliated with University of Queensland.