This week's "paper" is not a paper discussion and reaction notes, but a group presentation. Each Reading Group will prepare a 15 minute presentation on a specific parallel architecture and system that they will deliver in class week 2.

This week you will spend more time working with your Reading Group than usual. Together you will investigate your assigned parallel or distributed system, and prepare and deliver a 15 minute presentation on your system during your Monday lab section. You will also add a page to the wiki about your system that includes a short summary about your system and links to to useful information about the system that you discovered in preparing your presentation.

With your Reading Group you will:

1. Research your assigned system. I suggest adding content to your wiki page about your system as you go. I also suggest that you meet frequently to learn what each other has found and to plan your next round of finding things out.
2. Together Come up with and outline for your presentation, and create talk slides. You can use powerpoint, google docs, libreoffice (on our system), or anything you would like to create slides. You will need to produce a pdf version of your slides to upload to the wiki prior to your lab section meeting time in which you will give your talk.
3. Give practice talks and fix talk slides, talk content, and slide transitions that do not work well. And cut or add content based on its timing (12 minute of presentation with 3 minutes for questions).

The system type you present is based on your Reading Group ID number (CS87 wiki)

Here are the Assigned Systems.

For most of these, you are assigned a certain type of system, and you can then pick one particular system of this type for your prensentation.

Try to pick a particular system of your assigned type early based on how much information seems to be available on it, and then focus your effort on presenting information about that particular system. It is also valuable to include in your presentation some general characteristics about the type of system it is, but the details should be about your particular example system.

You will add a page to the CS87 wiki for your system. Your wiki page should contain the following two sections:

1. A title of your system, your names, and a short paragraph summary of your system
2. An annotated list of Reference materials. A list of all the reference materials that you used, each with a 1-2 sentence explanation of how useful it was. You do not need to list materials that you looked at but did not use or that you did not find helpful. I expect to see a few good links that contain useful information about your system or parts of your system (2 or 3 at a minimum, no more than 6 with annotations).

Together your group will give a 15 minute presentation on your system to your lab section (12 minutes of content, leave 3 minutes for questions). Every member of your group must participate in the presentation. Together decide who will talk for each slide.

Your presentation should address each of the items listed below. For some systems, discussing certain ones of these will take more time than for other systems. For example, for some systems the details of the architecture may be the most interesting, for others, it may be how the system is used. Part of your job is to determine which are the most important things to focus on.

1. Definition of the system, what type of system it is and how your particular machine fits this definition
2. Architecture overview. For this part you can grab figures from other sites (be sure to list a citation of from where you grabbed a figure if you do this)
3. How are processors/nodes interconnected?
4. Which parts are shared? Which are private?
5. Is the system designed or optimized for a specific type of use? Is it designed for a specific programming model, programming language or program workload? Or does it support general parallel computing. Explain.
6. How scalable is the system? explain.

It may be difficult to find answers to the last two items for all systems. Do the best you can, and based on what you find out about the other parts, you can at least say what your thoughts are about how well the system scales in some dimension.

This is also not an exhaustive list of what to cover. Part of your job is to determine what is interesting about your particular system.

How much to prepare and at what level: As you present parts of your system, do so in a top-down way: start with a high-level overview and then refine some parts in more detail. You only have 15 minutes, so you are going to have to pick one or two things to discuss in more detail, and leave much of the system to present at a high-level (and skip even discussing some parts of the system). Think big-picture definition of this system, and some detail about one (or two) things that are most unique or interesting about it. You do not need to know everything about the system you present, but you should be able to present both a high-level overview, some detail about an interesting part, and address the points above in your presentation.

Practice Talk and feedback

Your group should do at least one practice talk together, and I encourage you to do more than one. After the first one adjust slide content, figure out what you want to say for each slide, and adjust transitions between slides. Then, try another practice talk when you have made these changes. Repeat.

I also encourage you to give a practice talk to at least one other group (and be a practice talk audience for them). I suggest picking the group in the other lab section who is presenting a similar system to yours.

As you give your practice talk, do not stop and make changes as you go. It should be a timed dry run of your in-class presentation (12 minutes of presentation and 3 minutes for questions). You should have talked through your slides at least once prior to your practice talk.

Audience members should provide feedback to each person, to help them improve slide content, and phrasing and content of their part of the oral presentation. Write down your comments during other group member's parts of your presentation, and the end of your presentation, go back over feedback for all slides and all presenters together. Every audience member should provide two pieces of feedback to every presenter:

1. Things to improve
2. Things that went well

Neither should be empty. Your feedback should include presentation style, slide content, and presentation content. And, be sure to be as specific as possible in your comments to help the speakers improve their presentation.

• Tools for preparing presentation documents
• Tips for preparing an oral presentation
• wiki syntax from www.dokuwiki.org