Reading Schedule for CS87, Spring 2012

Contents:

Reaction Notes
Submitting Reaction Notes
Reading List of Papers

Reaction Notes

For most papers we read, you will write reaction notes prior to our class meeting to help prepare you for discussing the paper. You should bring a print out of your reaction notes and the paper to class with you. Reaction notes can be written in ascii, or Word, or latex, or ... whatever you want.

Reaction notes should should reflect your critical reading of the paper. Some questions to think about as you read: Did the authors do what they said they were going to do? What are the important ideas (just because an author says something is important doesn't mean it necessarily is)? Do their results make sense? Are their methods sound? Are there weaknesses in their solution? What assumptions are they making? How does their work fit in with other similar work? What improvements and/or extensions to the area do they contribute? Are there terms, ideas, techniques, that you don't understand?

Here are some tips for reading research papers

Reaction notes should be no more than one page in length and structured in the following way:

  1. Summary:
    A 1 paragraph summary of the paper. A summary of what the work is, what problem(s) it addresses, and the results or new technique (if applicable). Also, include a short list of the strengths and weaknesses of the work, and list how it is related to other work we have read (when applicable).

  2. Answer to Specific Question(s):
    A 1-2 paragraph answer to the specific question(s) associated with this paper.

    3. You are welcome to discuss other parts of the paper in addition to answering the specific question. However, it is not required that you do so.

  3. A list of questions you have about this paper:
    If there are terms, ideas, techniques that you don't understand, list them here. However, for terms you don't understand, also try to find the answer yourself by using on-line sources such as whatis.techtarget.com. If you find an answer, please leave the listing of the term on your reaction notes; it is helpful to me to see which terms are new to students so that I can make sure that we discuss their meaning.

Submitting Reaction Notes

Bring to class a printout of your reaction notes and the paper to discuss. You will hand in your reaction notes at the end of class.

Weekly Summary

For the weeks in which we read and discuss research papers, we will spend time summarizing the paper discussions at the end of the week. Students will take turns writing up the group summary on the class wiki.

Viewing and Printing Papers

You can view most postscript files (and gziped postscript files) using gv on our system: 
$ gv file.ps.gz
gv cannot handle some version of postscript, in this case you should save a copy of the paper.ps.gz file, gunzip it, and then either view it using gs or convert it to pdf and view it using acroread or xpdf: 
$ gunzip file.ps.gz
$ gs file.ps
$ ps2pdf file.ps
$ acroread file.pdf
You can print postscript using lpr, or print 2-up postscript files using mpage and lpr: 
$ lpr file.ps
$ mpage -2 -M-10 -dp file.ps | lpr
You can view (and print) pdf files using acroread or xpdf: 
$ acroread file.pdf
$ xpdf file.pdf

Reading List

In addition to the assigned readings, there are some related paper references here: Additional Cluster and Distributed Computing Papers

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

no papers

Week 6

Week 8

Week 10

Week 12

Week 13