Project

The warm-up project is meant to be done fairly quickly; you will have two weeks to work on this assignment. You will work on this project individually and then hand in a short report on your results. This project will be fairly well-defined. More details will be available later.

The main project in this course has two goals. The first goal is to help you learn more about doing research in general. The second goal is to give you the opportunity to study a particular area of OS in greater detail. Therefore, you are expected to perform a substantial research project; this involves selecting an open problem, reading the related work, designing, implementing, and evaluating a solution, and presenting your results. Your completed projects should be of high enough quality that it could (eventually) be published in a major operating systems conference. People should work in groups of size two; under no circumstances will larger groups be permitted!

You are strongly encouraged to select a project from my list of suggestions (but a project of your own devising is possible given sufficient justification at our initial project meeting). Remember, the best project for you is the one you feel motivated to do (not the easiest one, and not the most-likely-to-get-me-a-paper one). The project is your chance to work on something new and different -- I sincerely hope that not only will you learn a lot while doing your project, but also that you will have a lot of fun!

Throughout the semester, there will be a few milestones that you must meet for your main project:

  • Initial Meeting: We will use the initial meeting to help figure out which projects would be a good match for your interests and previous experience; therefore, before this initial meeting, you should have narrowed down the list of potential projects to two or three that you are interested in and should have read the listed background papers. Of course, you are more than welcome to informally talk to me about potential projects before this meeting!
  • Proposal Report: After our meeting, you should determine exactly what problem you will solve. In your project proposal, you should clearly state the problem you are planning to solve, the motivation for why this problem is important, your initial plans for approaching the problem, and your proposed methodology for evaluation. It should also discuss what resources you will use / need for the project, such as hardware or software tools. This report should contain references to at least one related background paper (not already listed by me) that you have read. Your write-up should be approximately a full page in length (or 500-1000 words).
  • Related work report: An important component in research is placing your contribution in the context of past work, which involves differentiating your work from previous work. (There is nothing worse than working on a problem, only to discover several months into the work, that someone has already solved it!) To ensure that you have found the applicable background material before beginning your own work, I would like to see a summary of the relevant papers that you have read (or, alas, skimmed). While the number of relevant papers will vary depending upon your project, you should search for 8 to 10 references and write 500-1000 words. To find relevant papers, you may want to check out the resources at the end of this page. Your report should contain the appropriate citations in a Reference section (I would suggest using bibtex for this). This write-up may later become the Related Work section of your final report (of course, you may need to add references, especially if the direction of your contribution changes).
  • Progress Meeting: After you have had about a month to work on your project, we will meet to discuss your progress and any problems that you are having. This will be an informal meeting, but you should come to the meeting prepared to talk about your initial results.
  • Final Meeting: Near the end of the semester, we will have one last meeting to discuss your results. At this meeting, you should summarize the problem you are solving, your approach, your methodology, and your results; you should plan how you will talk about these issues, but you do not need to prepare slides. You should absolutely bring all of your experimental results (in graph or table form). At this meeting, you will receive feedback on what you need to complete before your final report.
  • In-class presentations: All students will give a very brief overview of their projects in the last week of classes. Each group will have approximately 10 minutes to describe their work to the rest of the class. Given this short time-frame, you will be giving only a very broad overview of your results; do not expect to distill everything that you did and learned in this talk! The time limit will be strictly enforced! You may want to check out the following site for some hints on giving a good talk.
  • Final report: Your final write-up should be similar in style, length, and content to an OS conference paper. This is clearly the most important part of demonstrating your project! More details on writing the report will be given in class.
The following table summarizes the important dates for your project.

Event Due Date
Warm-up project available: Thursday 1/26
Warm-up project due: Thursday 2/9 (midnight)
Initial meeting: Weeks of 2/20 and 2/27
Proposal: Thursday, 3/02 (5 pm)
Related work report: Tuesday 3/28 (5 pm)
Progress meeting: Week of April 3
Final meeting: Week of April 17
In-class presentations: Week of 5/01
Final report: Tuesday, 5/09 (5 pm)

Resources

When searching for related work, I would suggesting starting with citeseer. You can search by keyword, but another very useful feature is to look for other (more recent) papers that reference a given related paper. Google Scholar provides keyword search of scholarly work in any field. Another good way to find a set of related papers is to start with the most recent related paper that you can find and to work backwards in time through its references. You can also get useful references from The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies and the DBLP computer science bibliography site. You'll note that both have bibliography entries in bibtex format, since many papers written in CS use latex (and thus bibtex). As a last resort, you can always search the web as a whole with a general search engine.

Specific OS Publications:
Operating system research papers are presented in a number of major conferences and journal. When looking for related work, it also makes sense to at least look at the titles and abstracts from papers published in the sources for the last few years.

In summary, these are the top conferences and journals to keep in mind for OS research, whether you are thinking about publishing your own work, searching for related work, or trying to keep out-to-date with the field.

Finally, a collection of advice papers is available in the Advice Papers List. I highly recommend that you read these papers on your own; however, you will not be held responsible for them.

Local Resources
Computer Systems Lab Homepage
Crash and Burn Lab