CSE 223B Term Project

Project Checkpoint

Each group should submit a 1-2 page write up describing the progress you have made to date, and a detailed set of deliverables you plan to submit at the end of the term. In particular, you should be concrete about:

The particular software artifact you intent to complete.
A high-level description of the design of your system.
Any existing software packages you are using as a basis for your development.
Your evaluation plan for this artifact. How will you measure success? What will you use for a testbed? Do you need any resources from us?

This is also a great point to notify us of any challenges you have enountered so far, any modifications in your originally proposed goals, or basically anything else you'd like to bring to our attention. As a reminder, you will be submitting an 8-10 page report at the end of the term in the same style as the research papers we've read in class describing your system, and any text you write for this checkpoint will be a great start toward that goal.

Project Ideas

I have listed a number of possible project ideas. By no means are you limited by these ideas; in fact, I encourage you to come up with some of your own. Even if you do choose to go with one of these, keep in mind they're only starting points. Each of the ideas on this list will require considerable flushing out and refining in order to turn it into a reasonable project proposal.

I realize each of you are in different stages of your graduate career, and are looking for different things out of a course project. While all of the ideas below likely could result in a suitable class project, they vary in their ambitiousness and scope. You do NOT need to conduct original research for the class project---implementing something real is just fine. Those of you with aspirations of possibly publishing your work might think about tackling something more open-ended, however.

Some of the projects require access to resources in my research group. Plese contact me if you're interesting in persuing one of them so I can make sure we have enough resources to go around. I also have credits for various Amazon Web Services (e.g., EC2, S3, Elastic MapReduce, CloudFront, DynamoDB, RDS) that I can provide for use in this course, so feel free to think big.

Implement a distributed shared memory system along the lines of IVY or TreadMarks. You could implement it at the user level like TreadMarks so that you could run it on EC2.
Build a collaborative editing environment like Google Docs or Etherpad.
Use Fuse to implement a distributed file system with consistency semantics of your choosing. You could probably use your Lab 3 as a good starting point.
Measure the performance of memcached on interesting workloads, identify sources of poor performance, and improve things.
In a recent talk Larry Carter proposed using Cartesian Coordinates to manage the amount of memory movement in algorithms, as memory costs now frequently dominate computation. This is especially true in distributed computations. Consider applying his technique to MapReduce. The idea is to quantify the tradeoff between different ways of moving data to/from computation.
Extend any of the papers we've read to fix problems they left danging.

Last updated: Tue May 20 08:27:51 -0700 2014 [validate xhtml]