CSE 221: Graduate Operating Systems

Fall 2001

Final Project Report and Presentation

Report

Your final project will embodied in a report. The structure of the report is going to depend on the type of final project that you do:

• Research Summary: Consider the report a giant evaluation. Introduce the topic, summarize and synthesize the research that you've read, and then discuss and evaluate the issues, results, approaches, and open questions. One possibility is to structure the discussion around a set of questions that you pose and answer in the context of the research you are evaluating. As with the evals, just summarizing the research papers is not a complete report.

• Experimental Evaluation: Introduce the problems and questions you are answering, describe your methodology, and then discuss the results and the conclusions you can make from the results. Be sure to describe each graph and/or table in your report, and be clear about what the point of the graph and/or table is (what result are you showing, what conclusion are you trying to make).

• White Paper Proposal: Introduce the topic and research problems, describe related work, discuss the key questions (e.g., performance, scalability) of your approach or system, and describe how you would evaluate those questions -- what experiments would you run, and how you would use the results of those experiments to answer the questions, or demonstrate a performance goal.

Reports are limited to 6-8 pages (not including references), except for 5-person groups, which can go to 10 pages. Strive to meet this page limit; we have to read a large number of final reports. If you are finding it difficult to meet that page limit, try condensing the summary parts of the report to leave room for synthesis and analysis. Use at least a 10pt font, either in single or double column format. It must be formatted using a document processing system -- ASCII text is not acceptable.

Submit a hardcopy directly to me or slide one under my door. I will grade the hardcopy version. Also send an online version, either postscript or pdf, to both me and Dmitrii. We will place them on the class Web pages for everyone to download and peruse in advance of the presentations. If you use Word, print to a file using a reasonable postscript driver and send us the output as a postscript file. Do not send the Word document (Word is not very portable).

The online version is due at 8am on Monday, December 3.

Presentation

You will present your project to the class during the final exam period, Tuesday, December 4, at 8:00am (same location as lectures). Every group will give a presentation, so time will be limited to 10 minutes per group. Aim for 8 minutes of presentation and 2 minutes of questions. I will use a watch to keep track of time and have to cut you off if you run over, so make sure that you prepare your talk accordingly. You can have one person do the talk, or everyone, it is up to you.

In terms of what to put in your talk, I would think of it this way: Use your 10 minutes to teach the class about what you did and learned in your project -- it's a 10 minute lecture to educate us about your topic.

I will arrange to have a video projector and overhead projector at the final exam. I will place transparencies outside my door. If you would like to project from my laptop, bring a floppy with your presentation or email it to me ahead of time (email is preferrable to cut down on the context switch time).