Purpose:
The purpose of our seminar series is to familiarize ourselves with recent and important research topics and advances in the field. This research oriented study has numerous advantages. To name only a few would be the ability to use your background knowledge for further study in an area, preparation for graduate level research, familiarity with recent advances in the field, self study in an interest area, and the opportunity to communicate research ideas to others.

Projects and their implementations will be carried out either individually or in teams of two. You will be graded based on your work, organization, and clarity of your presentation. (Depending on the number of students in class, we may change the number of members per teams per project.)

You may select a research topic to investigate and present to class which is completely independent of your project topic. However, it is recommended that you try to choose your research topic so that your studies will enhance your knowledge in support of your selected project. 

Your proposals (both for the research and for the project) should be one typed page long describing the research/project briefly complete with references. It should describe what will be covered in your research/project. If you work in teams, then submit one proposal with both your names. Describe as much as possible the areas of responsibilities.

Research Paper:
Propose a topic to study in depth. You may investigate any area within the scope of computer architectures, to name a few:

Memory system/hierarchy/storage systems
Cache memory/strategies
Parallel architectures,
Performance modeling,
Hardware synchronization mechanisms,
Hardware simulations
Networking
Clusters
Fault Tolerant Designs

Project:
Propose a project that you will implement. You may choose to simulate an architectural feature, model a system, compare different strategies on the same or different machines, measure performance of different implementations, develop a set of bench marks, study system affects of specific architecture on performance such as caching, paging, latency, simulate execution pipelines, simulate arithmetic pipelines, etc.

A report in your own wording on the final project is needed.  I would need a CD copy of the program, test data sets, and instructions for running the program. The report must explain your methods, findings, comparisons, and your learning experience. An adequate list of references should be included with each project. Keep all formats simple, use MS Word for you documentation.

Computer Equipments:

• You may use any computer systems available to you for the project, provided that all group members have equal access to the selected computers.
•  
• We have a newly established "Experimental Research Lab" in NC 2608. This Lab is for the purpose of experimental work. It allows you to implement variety of experiments without too much concern regarding "hacking" the system and interfering with general lab computers.
• The department has both Unix and Windows machines available for educational use. On these computers, you should plan on any code that you write executing in user mode (you will only be able to run in user mode on department educational machines). If you think that you need to hack the kernel, discuss your intentions with me early on and plan to use the "Experimental Research Lab".

Presentations:
We will organize and schedule the presentations by topics.

Use the seminar preparation guide (included in this hand out) to help prepare your presentation.

While preparing for your presentation, keep the following questions in mind. These are provided to give guidance for your presentation effectiveness. After you are prepared, grade yourself with a number between 0-10 on each question and give an overall letter grade (A-F) on each of the 3 areas.

I. Communication [Letter Grade =}
 

 1. Is the “problem” defined clearly?
 2. Are explanations clear?
 3. Is it clear how the system was developed?
             (i.e.: Language, Architecture, Commercial Software, Algorithms,....)
 4. Is the material well organized? (Both individual and team work)
 5. Effective visual aids?
 6. Creative and interesting?

II. Research [Letter Grade=]
 

  1. Good knowledge of the field?
  2. Clear comparison between well known related systems or topics?
  3. Has clearly identified the technical successes, failures, and limitations of their system?
 4. Relates clearly and precisely to Parallel Processing problems?
 5. Specific references to material discussed in class?
 6. Appropriate and accurate use of technical words?

III. Analysis   [Letter Grade=]
 

 1. Problem is well analyzed, bringing out the critical issues?
 2. Use of graphs, charts, statistics, equations, examples, etc.?
 3. Logical structure of the problem is well analyzed?
 4. Distinction made clearly between the use of logic versus the use of probability?