CS87 Course Project Part 1:
Written Proposal and Annotated Bibliography

due: before 11:59pm Saturday March 24

How to submit your report:

Using swatmail, gmail, yahoo, or something similar, email me a pdf version of your report, sending the report .pdf file(s) as attachments. You are welcome to additionally send me other forms of the report like .tex files, but this is not necessary. You should cc yourself and immediately make sure that the email went through and the attachments worked. In the body of your email also tell me where in your subdirectories on our system a copy of your report .pdfs are, and do not modify these after the due date.
If you cannot get the attachments to work, put your .pdf files somewhere in your directory system, and send me email immediately (i.e. Saturday night before 11:59pm) telling me where in your .pdf files are (the full path), and do not modify them (I'll use the modification date and our backup system to determine if you submitted these on time or not). I WILL NOT accept any reports late; a late report will result in a zero for this part of the project.

Counts towards 5% of your final grade

If you have not already done so, first read the page about the course project that gives a high-level overview of the project and lists the specific parts with tentative due dates for later parts: CS87 course project

Annotated Bibliography

You should create an annotated bibliography of at least 4 papers related to your project (more is fine). As you read each paper, add an entry to your annotated bibliography. An annotated bibliography will list each paper as it would appear in a references section of a research paper. In addition, each listing is annotated with a couple paragraphs that describes the work. Use the course reaction notes as a guide for writing the annotation part: each paper should have 1 paragraph that summarizes the work, lists strengths and weaknesses, and discusses the main contribution of the work, and it should have 1 paragraph that analyzes the work in the context of how it is related to your project (think about asking and answering some questions about this work related to the project you are addressing).

Written Project Proposal:

Your project proposal should be 4-7 pages long. It should clearly state the problem you are solving, how you are solving it, and explicitly list your plan for completing your proposed project. Specifically, your proposal should contain the following:
  1. Title and Authors
  2. An Introduction: 1-2 paragraph summary of the problem you are solving, why it is interesting, how you are solving it, and what conclusions you expect to draw from your work.
  3. Related Work: 1-2 paragraphs describing similar approaches to the one you propose. This need not be an exhaustive summary of related literature, but should be used to put your solution in context and/or to support your solution. This is also a good way to motivate your work. This can be a summary taken from your longer annotated bibliography.
  4. Your Solution: 3-4 paragraphs describing what you plan to do, how you plan to do it, how it solves the problem, and what types of conclusions you expect to draw from your work.
  5. Experiments: 1-3 paragraphs describing how you plan to evaluate your work. List the experiments you will perform. For each experiment, explain how you will perform it and what the results will show (explain why you are performing a particular test).
  6. Equipment Needed: 1 paragraph listing any software tools that you will need to implement and/or test your work. If you need to have software installed to implement your project, you should check with the systems lab to see if it is something that can be installed on the CS lab machines.
  7. Schedule: list the specific steps that you will take to complete your project, include dates and milestones. This is particularly important to help keep you on track, and to ensure that if you run into difficulties completing your entire project, you have at least implemented steps along the way. Also, this is a great way to get specific feedback from me about what you plan to do and how you plan to do it.
  8. Conclusions: 1 paragraph summary of what you are doing, why, how, and what you hope to demonstrate through your work.
If you want to use latex and bibtex, I have sample starting point files in /home/newhall/public/latex_examples/bibtex that you may find useful.

Getting Started

Some ideas for course project will be available starting week 7 here: 
/home/newhall/public/cs87/projectideas.pdf
You are welcome to use one of these as a starting point for developing a project, or to come up with your own idea.

Once you have one or two general ideas for projects, you will want to more completely define exactly what you plan to do and how you plan to do it. A good way to start with this step is to take a look at related work; you want to have an understanding of what has been done, and how what you want to do fits into the field. It will help you modify and more completely define your project, and get some ideas of how to implement and test your project.

Take a look at the "Getting Started" section of my CS Research and Writing Guide for links to places to look for related work papers.
Also take a look at some of the papers on the Additional Cluster and Distributed Computing Papers link off the cs87 homepage.

Another place to start getting ideas is to look at recent conference proceedings from SC, cluster, and other parallel and distributed computing conferences:

Machines and Software Available for your use:

If there is other software you need that is not available on our stysem, we may be able to install it or install it on our system or on some of our machines. You should talk with me and Jeff about this. Benchmarks and Tools: