The goal of the project is to let you apply the ideas we discuss during class. You may pick whatever project topic you want. Rather than list projects, I want you to pick a topic you're interested in, possibly one based on one or more of the papers we read in class. The one requirement is that there must be a significant systems issue related to what we are discussing in class involved in your project. You may pick a topic with substantial work in another area, but you will be graded on the systems-related component of your project.
A good project is likely to be open-ended. In fact, many ideas will not have obvious termination conditions. Because of the nature of these projects, and to encourage you to set your sights high, the project grade will not be based on whether you complete your project. It will be based on your understanding and analysis of the project, your discovery and application of related work, your developing a sound technique and a plan to produce a proof-of-concept, and your progress toward implementing and testing your ideas. It is more important to develop something that can be analyzed and tested than to develop a complete system.
A variety of project types are possible. The systems-related component might be your implementation and evaluation of a new software component, performance measurement of an existing system, simulation of a system, or an analytical or statistical study of a system. The expectations of the various components will vary according to the topic. For example, a substantial implementation might be the majority of one project, while for a performance measurement project, workload design and characterization might be the most significant component.
Here are the important deadlines for your project:
All projects are individual. No two students may do the same project. Please come discuss your project idea with me prior to submitting your proposal.
A proposal should be 2-3 pages, 12pt, single spaced, plus figures, illustrations, and bibliography. It should have an introduction, which should describe the problem you wish to solve; background, which should give the history of this problem; related work, which describes other solutions to this problem; and your proposed solution, which should include a general description of the what components you will need to implement and how you will evaluate your project.
Important factors to discuss in your proposal include Goal, Technique, Metric, and Workload. Thinking through this process is key to a successful project.
Proposals must have a bibliography of related work.
Project descriptions are revised versions of the proposal, based on feedback from the instructor and based on your continued work on the details of your project. You should have a good plan for what needs to be implemented and how it will be evaluated by this time. The project description should be about 5 pages long.
The mid-project report is a status update on your project. Essentially, you should take your project description and update it with your status and preliminary results. Depending on the project, the size of this report will vary, but you should have made significant progress by this point.
Your final report on your project will take the form of a poster, to be presented in the poster session in McG-S 020 at 3PM on Dec 7 (Friday). This should be a standard-form 2'x3' poster. Additional results or graphs can be presented separately in standard paper format, but the poster should stand on its own with your key results. You will also provide me with a hardcopy (8.5x11) version of your poster and a 3 page summary of your project and results. The department community will be invited to the poster session.
Hints for designing a poster in powerpoint are available. These are not official requirements, just a handout put together at another university on how to design a nice poster.
Your posters will be put in /home/scratch/posters. You need to send email to techie after you put your file there. The poster should be a pdf file formatted for 24"x36". If you haven't tested already, make sure you know how to generate a pdf file like this with whatever document system you're using. With powerpoint, for example, you use "page setup" to set the page layout. If you're using a machine with acrobat installed, when you print to "Adobe PDF" you need to go into properties->layout->Advanced to change the page size when you print, as well.
Techie has more information about printing posters as well as latex templates for doing a poster in latex.
Your posters must be in /home/scratch/posters by 8AM Thursday, Dec 6, so techie has time to print them. That gives you almost two days to work on your 3 page writeup. When you hand that in, again please hand in your previous project submissions back to me.
Whenever you submit a component of your project, include the earlier
submissions that I made comments on. That makes it easier for me to
follow the progress of your project during the semester.
Ext3 file system improvement using buffer mechanisms
Caching Strategies for Multimedia Applications
Performance Enhancement by DNS prefetching for Web Browsering
QoS Oriented Service Grid Work Flow
Implement Memory Management Control Similar to that of the Original
VAX/VMS System in the Linux Kernel
Increase Performance of ext3 with USB Flash Drivers
Implementing Mobility in TOSSIM
Garbage Collection Performance During Paging
Simulating Internet Traffic: Do Invariants Still Exist?
Performance of the Coda File System