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Project

Project Preliminary Ideas: Due 9AM Friday, October 22nd (or earlier) -- 5% of Project Grade
Proposal: Due 9AM on Friday, October 29th (or earlier) -- 10% of Project Grade
Progress Report: Due 9AM on Friday, November 19th -- 10% of Project Grade
Lightning Talk: Due 9AM Wednesday, December 8th -- 5% of Project Grade
Talks: Monday, December 13th, 930AM - 230PM (in CS 3310) -- 30% of Project Grade
Final Project Report: Due 230PM Tuesday, December 21st -- 40% of Project Grade

Weight: 40%

Project Goal

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 we will read in this course. 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 first 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 the area, introduce your design and how it helps resolve the problem(s), give extensive references to support your arguments, and conclude with an explanation of how your approach resolves the problem(s).

In the second option, you may work a group of two to write a paper that surveys an area within computer architecture. The paper should: summarize work in an area, give extensive references, 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, you may turn in your project ideas, proposal, progress report, and lightning talk up to 24 hours late with a 10% penalty. I strongly recommend that you do not avail yourself of this option; your hard work deserves full credit. You are also allowed two free late days total for all project components. However, since final grades have a hard cutoff date, you may not use more than 1 late day for the final report.

Preliminary Project Ideas

Send your project ideas by email (one email per team, CC team member(s)), use subject: [CS752 Project Ideas]. You should prepare 2-3 project ideas that you would like to pursue. It is fine to have a preferred topic, but you must think about at least one alternative. You should also tell me the names and email addresses of each of the project team members.

Project Proposal

Upload your proposal (and the checklist) to Canvas.

Proposals should be about two pages long (10 point font, single spaced, 1 inch margins, either single or double-column per page, any of the standard formats like IEEE is fine). They should include:


  • Names and email addresses of each of the project team members,
  • A description of your topic,
  • A statement of why you think the topic is interesting or important,
  • For research projects, a description of the methods you will use to evaluate your ideas
  • References to at least three relevant papers you have already read
  • A plan to address other related work.

Accompanying your proposal submission, you should also review the proposal checklist to ensure that your proposal contains all of the above components. You should submit the following checklist rubric with your proposal.

The synthesis lecture and the papers we've read point to many other papers that you may find useful. 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. See here for some pointers to on-line resources that may also be useful.

Project Progress Report

Submit your Progress Report on Canvas

Progress Reports should include a revised (and extended) version of the proposal plus at least one new page describing accomplishments so far and any unresolved problems that you have encountered. 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".

It is also common for the list of related work to have expanded to 5-8 papers (i.e., your related work section should be longer).

Your progress report will be graded using the following rubric: Progress Report Grading Rubric

Project Lightning Talk

Upload your Lightning Talk to Canvas

Computer Architecture conferences are increasingly utilizing online lightning talks to motivate your conference talk. To help you prepare for this, your course project will also have a lightning talk. Your lightning talk should be a 90 second version of your talk designed to encourage people to attend your talk. The best talks will provide a memorable introduction to your talk. As incentive for making a good lightning talk, the best lightning talk will get to choose when they present during the Project Talks.

The only rules for the Lightning Talk are: a) it has to be 90 seconds or less, b) it cannot contain any inappropriate language, remarks, etc. and c) it should be done in a format that could potentially be uploaded to YouTube (since that's what conferences are doing nowadays). Beyond these requirements, you can be as creative as you would like. The goal is to stand out, while also relating the lightning talk to your project -- if your lightning talk is completely unrelated to the project, it likely won't help encourage people to attend. If only one person from the group appears in the video, then please send me an email (similar format to the other email) explaining what the other project member(s) role(s) was.

Your lightning talk will be graded using the following rubric: Lightning Talk Grading Rubric (Note: this rubric may be updated)

Some examples of recent lightning talks, both good and bad, can be found here: ISCA 2018 and MICRO 2018.

Before, when the talks were done as part of the conference, I gave several lightning talks, which you can view here:

Project Talks

We will schedule a mini-conference of 20-minute conference-style talks. Of this time, 16 minutes should be spent presenting and 4 minutes will be spent answering questions. All group members should deliver part of the talk and answer some of the questions. 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. We will be using the same presentation grading rubric as prior semesters: Presentation Grading Rubric

Upload the final slides 90 minutes before the presentation to Canvas. Not uploading your slides to Canvas by this time will reduce your project presentation grade by 10%.

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 Project Report

Upload your PDF (and the checklist) to Canvas

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. The body must include a section that describes which tasks each group member worked on. If multiple group members worked on the same task, please explain what each group member did for that task. Additional supporting material of any length can be put in appendices. I will read the body and only skim appendices.

Your final report will be graded using the following rubric: Final Report Grading Rubric. You should submit the final report checklist with your final report, in order to ensure that your report contains all the expected components.

If you would like help improving your writing, I encourage you to take advantage of the UW Writing Center. Professor Reps also has a good set of reference slides on how to write papers, which you may want to look at.

The report must be written in your own words, and your submitted reports will be run through plagiarism detection software. Please review the Writing Center guidelines on appropriate quotation, paraphrasing, and citation of prior work (PDF). Failure to substantially follow these guidelines will be treated as academic misconduct.

Topics

You are encouraged to come up with your own topic. Ideally, the topic will be related to your current research interests.

There can be value in combining your project with other work in one of two ways. First, if you have active research in a related area, you can do a deeper project by combining your current (supported) research with your course project. Second, it is also possible to do a single multi-disciplinary project to satisfy multiple courses (e.g., CS736). However, this must be coordinated with the other instructor(s) and you will be expected to do two (or more) projects worth of work. 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.