CIS655/CSE661 Term Project [weblink]
The term project has two options: survey-oriented option and programming option.
There are some sample topics described in the document, and students are free to choose from the sample topics or propose new topics for their projects; the new topic should reflect the recent advances of computer architecture in recent years.
If the programming option is taken, students can work in groups; In this case, a student is allowed to collaborate with students inside his/her group (but NO collaborations between groups). A group can consist of up to 5 people at most; and group members are encouraged to designate a group coordinator, who should be the one to submit deliverable.
If the survey-oriented option is taken, students are required to work individually.
The requirements based on the timeline below must be submitted through blackboard; all submission links can be found following the path through “class session -> term project”.
There will be four milestones where the progress of the project will be checked.
Week | Survey | Programming |
MS0: Week 4 Due: Sep. 19 | Topic assigned Deliverable format: [link] | Group/topic assigned Deliverable format: [link] |
MS1: Week 6 Due: Oct. 7 | Reference list Deliverable format: [link] | Background study and project design Deliverable format: [link] |
MS2: Week 10 Due: Nov. 14 | Preliminary report Deliverable format: [link] | System setup and deployment Deliverable format: [link] |
MS3: Week 12 Report Due:Dec.12 | Final paper/presentation Deliverable format: [link] | Final report/demo Demo due: Dec. 5 |
Students taking this option are expected to choose from sample projects, follow the project instructions and set up and deploy the system, implement the designed components, conduct benchmark study and performance analysis, and demonstrate the designed system.
Students taking this option are expected to choose one topic from the provided ones (or make a proposal), find related references (research papers, technical official blogs, white papers and open-source projects), write a technology review more than 15 pages.
Note that this can be more than a pure "text-writing" task --- students are encouraged (there will be bonus points) to explore existing open-source projects and to demonstrate the practical aspects of the topic (e.g. what kind of new APIs are made available to software programmers).
While some materials are provided in given topics, you are encourage to find relevant materials in high quality. For good research papers, they are usually published in premier conferences (e.g. ISCA, MICRO, HPCA, OSDI, SOSP, EUROSYS, NSDI, ASPLOS, SIGMOD, VLDB, etc). For technical blog and white paper, they should be the ones posted by reputable companies (e.g. Google Research Blog, Blog@Intel, etc). Open-source projects can be found in Apache website and etc.
In principle you are free to choose topics. The requirement is that the proposed topic should be 1) relevant to computer architecture, 2) reflecting the recent advances (not something outdated and already there for more than decades) and 3) something real and practical (e.g. quantum computer may not be a good topic since there is no actually working system).
Yes, you can. As mentioned earlier in this document, it is actually encouraged and will be offered with bonus points (if you can demonstrate some practical aspects of the survey topic).
Yes, you can. But be aware of the workload and the risk of not finishing the programming tasks.