How to submit

Hand in a printout of your project proposal and your annotated bibiliography pdf to me before the due date. Also push the proposal.tex source to your project repo (As soon as you have your project group, email me your project group members' names, and I will created a repo for you with the latex starting point files for your proposal and annotated bibilography).
I WILL NOT accept any proposals late; a late submission will result in a zero for this part of the project.

These parts count 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

Contents

• Annotated Bibliography
• Written Proposal
• Getting Started and Some Project Ideas

You should create an annotated bibliography of at least 3 papers closely 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).

For your own purposes, I encourage you to add a second part that lists additional related papers/work in your bibliography and to include a very brief summary of them (you do not need to include the full required annotation of the 3 most related). I will not grade these, but doing so may be helpful as you refine your project over the course of the semster, and it may help me point out some other related work to your project.

Look at the annotated bibliography section of my CS Research and Writing Guide the "Getting Started" section below for links to places to look for related work papers.

Your project proposal should be 4-5 pages long (in addition to your annotated bibiliography). 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 Jeff Knerr 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.

You must use my latex template for your written report. Once you notify me of your project group members, I'll create a git repo for your project that will include the latex template for your report. It will be based on one like this example: /home/newhall/public/latex_examples/paper
Your Project repo contains:

FinalReport/  MidwayReport/  ProjectProposal/  README.md  source/

You should write your proposal and your annotated bibilography in the ProjectProposal subdirectory in the proposal.tex file. Look at the README.md files for more information about the repo contents.

You are strongly encouraged to come up with your own idea for a course project. However, I have suggestions for some, which are available here (and please, these are not for public distribution):

evince ~newhall/public/cs87/project_ideas_s18.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. There are links to USENIX conference proceedings and to ACM and IEEE digital libraries. I have links to some other (older) papers here: Additional Cluster and Distributed Computing Papers.

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

• SC conferences (look for Technical Session to find papers):
• IPDPS conferences
• Other ACM, IEEE, and USENIX sponsered conferences. Here are a few suggestions: PODC (Principles of Distributed Computing) www.podc.org, HPDC www.hpdc.org, ICDCS, PPoPP, IEEE Cluster, ... USENIX conference proceedings USENIX has a lot of top systems conferences. Some that may be more applicable to course projects include: OSDI, IPTPS, NSDI, HotPar, USENIX ATC, HotCloud, HotStorage, FAST
• other ACM sponsered conferences can be found of their main web page www.acm.org. Looking as specfic SIG pages may be useful, for example SIGOPS sponsored conferences: sigops confs
• all IEEE Conferences: www.computer.org and search for parallel and distributed conferences under the "Conferences" menu
• and USENIX conferences at www.usenix.org

Machines and Software Available for your use:

• openMPI: runs on all lab machines
• openMP: on all lab machines
• CUDA: runs all lab machines
• all CS lab machines
• chervil (available only to CS87 students)
• XSEDE access to large clusters and other parallel machines. All machines support MPI, and many also support CUDA and other parallel languges.
• If you want to install python libraries that don't exist on our system, here is some information about Seting up virtual environments

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.

Some Benchmarks and Tools:

• my list of parallel and distrubuted computing links
• NAS parallel benchmarks
• HPL linpack benchmarks
• WWW Computer Architecture Page Tools links to benchmarks, simulators, and other tools. Not all of these are applicable to parallel computing. This page has not been updated recently, but there may be some good links here, or at least starting points for searches of related current tools.