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Project
Project email: Due 9am Wed Oct 1st (or earlier)
Proposal: At Lecture on Monday Oct 20 (or earlier)
Progress Report: At Lecture on Wednesday Nov 12
Talks: December 10th and 12th, time TBA
Project Report: Hardcopy in my mailbox, 5pm Fri Dec 12
Weight: 35%
The project has two options. The first option is to do some original
research in computer architecture (e.g.,
write a simulator and gather some simple numbers) or to re-validate data
found in a published paper.
This type of project is especially recommended for students
considering a Ph.D.
You will be graded on how well you define
your problem, survey previous work, design and conduct experiments, and
present your results.
The goal to shoot for is a conference paper, like the ones
in your reader. Since time is limited, however, the above goal
is hard to reach, and I will reward those that aim high even if
they do not completely succeed.
The key is insuring that some aspects of your work are completely
done; it is very hard to grade a project where the simulator
did not quite work.
This type of project should use groups of two.
With my permission, project groups of one or three are permissible.
In the second option, you may work as a group of two
to write a 15-20 page paper
that surveys an area within computer architecture.
The paper should:
summarize work in an area, giving extensive references to support your arguments,
present opinions of others for and against various options
(with references), and
conclude with your opinion of the strengths and weaknesses of
arguments presented above.
You will be graded on the completeness of your survey,
the accuracy of your summaries,
the support you give for your opinions, and
the quality of your presentation.
Since a survey paper is "safer" than a research project, I will hold
survey papers to a higher standard of completeness and analysis of
the literature.
For this project, papers turned
in up to 24 hours hours late will be accepted with
a 25% penalty. Don't avail yourself of this option; your hard work
deserves full credit.
Project Email
To ensure that you get an early start on your project, you are required to start an email discussion with me about possible topics no later than October 1st at 9am. Be sure that your email has the subject line: CS752 Project: your names, so that I can find them easily in my mail program.
Your email should identify (tentatively) who will be in the project group and at least one
tentative project topic.
Proposal
Proposals may be turned in earlier to get earlier feedback.
Feel free to come and talk with me during my office hours or
by appointment. Proposals should be about two pages long plus references.
They should include:
- A description of your topic,
- A statement of why you think the topic is interesting or important,
- (for projects with original research)
a description of the methods you will use to evaluate your ideas, and
- References to at least three papers you have obtained and read.
(The text and the papers we've read point to many papers. See also
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Computer Architecture,
Proceedings of the High-Performance Computer Architecture,
Proceedings of the conference on Architectural Support for Programming
Languages and Operating Systems,
IEEE Transactions on Computers, ACM
Transactions on Computer Systems, IEEE Computer, IEEE Micro,
IEEE Transactions on
Parallel and Distributed Systems.)
- Near the end of the course web page are a couple pointers to on-line
resources.
Progress Report
Progress Reports should include a revised version of the proposal
plus an additional 2-3 pages describing accomplishments so far and presenting an
updated reference list (at least 6 papers for a research project and 10 papers for a survey). Concentrate on
describing sub-tasks completed, rather than the tasks started. For
example, say ``completed simulator design at subroutine level''
rather than saying ``started writing simulator''.
Project Talks
We will schedule a mini-conference of 20-minute conference-style talks. Depending on class size,
we may have to break it into multiple sessions. All group members should deliver
part of the talk. The talk should give highlights of the final report, including
the problem, motivation, results, conclusions, and possible future work. Time
limits will be enforced to let everyone present. Please, practice your talk to
make it better and see how long it is. Have a plan for what slides to skip if
you get behind. Please see Oral
Presentation Advice, including David Patterson's How to Give a
Bad Talk and K. Compton and M.L.Chang's
Terrible
Presentations (...and how to not give one).
Final Report
Reports should consist of an abstract, body and optional appendices, much
like a conference paper. The abstract should summarize the contributions
of the report in one or two paragraphs. The length of the body should
be the equivalent of 15-20 pages at double-spaced 10-point. Additional
supporting material of any length can be put in appendices. I will read
the body and only skim appendices. See your reader for examples of good papers.
All students, especially those with limited experience writing papers in English,
should consider making use of the
UW Writing Center.
Topics
You are encouraged to come up with your own topic in consultation with me,
the TA, other faculty, and your peers. Ideally, the topic
will be related to your current research interests. For example, if
you have an interest in compilers, then code scheduling for instruction
level parallelism might be a good topic. If you are interested in VLSI
design, a project related to power or pipeline clocking would be good.
If you are
interested in databases, quantifying the architectural characteristics
of database workloads, and comparing them with characteristics of other
workloads (e.g., SPEC) might be good. Some simulators (e.g., Simplescalar and Multifacet GEMS) and benchmark programs (e.g., SPEC2006) will be available for carrying
out simulation studies.
It is possible to do a single multi-disciplinary project to satisfy
multiple courses (e.g., CS736). However, this must be coordinated with
both me and the other instructor(s) and you will be expected to do two (or more)
projects worth of work. Similarly, if you have active research in a
related area, it is fine to combine your current (supported) research
with your course project. In all such cases, it is imperative that
such overlaps be disclosed at the proposal stage so that we can
address the scope of research that will be required.
A somewhat stale list of possible topics; I'll update this soon..
Limited to those at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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