Gary, thanks for asking! I'll focus mainly on setting up, rather than solving an SDP problem. Time permitting, however, I'd like to go thru a high-level walkthru of how SDPs are solved and leave you with a roadmap thru the long and winding discussion in sections 3-5.

So, I recommend reading sections 1 & 8 carefully. For section 2, I'd suggest looking thru the examples, but not getting bogged down in things like Young's modulus of elasticity. The main example I'll cover is from a different paper - subgraph matching for computer vision. Also, I'll go over the example of handling a nonlinear constraint (pg 3) using Schur complements. Then, if you can hang tough to read sections 3-5 thru once that will help you get more out of the walkthru I hope to give. I won't cover anything from sections 6 or 7.

Hope this helps,
Robin