Coursework

The class will comprise the following four graded activities.

  1. Paper reviews (30%): Required to read and submit a short review for two papers (the required readings in schedule) before each class.

    Suggested outline: You’re required to submit a short (<200 words) and constructive review. Here’s an example outline

    • What is the problem being solved?
    • Why is it an interesting problem?
    • What are the key technical insights of the solution?
    • What are a few potential limitations of the current solution?
    • What are a few potential next problems to be solved in this direction?

    Deadline 10:00 am CST on the day of the corresponding lecture

    Submission Pleae use this form to submit the reviews

  2. Paper presentations (10%): Students will take turns giving a 30 min presentation on one paper each in every lecture. The presentation should cover the related works for the presented paper/topic, and should include relavant recommended readings in addition to the required readings.

    Suggested outline: The presentation should no longer than 20 slides. Here’s an outline.

    • What is the problem being solved? (1-2 slides)
    • Why is it an interesting problem? (1-2 slides)
    • What is the existing solution space (related work)? (3-4 slides)
    • What are the key technical insights of the solution? (3-4 slides)
    • What are the techniques used to solve the problem? (3-4 slides)
    • What are a few potential limitations of the current solution? (1-2 slides)
    • What are a few potential next problems to be solved in this direction? (1-2 slides)

    Deadline Submit slides by 10:00am CST Friday of the week before your presentation. Additionally, the presenter must meet Saksham during the office hours (1:00pm Friday) the week before your presentation to review the slides. Please schedule a meeting with Saksham via email at least 2 days before the lecture if the you cannot make it to the office hour.

    Submission Please use this form to submit the slides.

  3. Class participation (10%): You’re required to actively participate in the class discussion.

  4. Research project or Survey (50%): Students are also expected to do either a research project (alone, or in a group of 2), or write a survey report (alone). For the project, the students can choose any topic relevant to the course (see the schedule). Talk to Saksham for more details.

    Instructions for Research Track: Students should clearly motivate the problem, introduce some new research ideas towards solving the problem, design and implement (or perform simulations to demonstrate feasibility of) their solution, and evaluate against relevant related work.

    Instructions for Survey Track: Students should choose one concrete problem relevant to the course, and write a detailed report motivating the problem, summarizing and categorizing how existing literature has tackled the problem, and discuss remaining open questions.

    Checkpoints: Students must provide following for both reasearch and survey tracks

    1. Project proposal: For the research track, the a 1-2 page description of the proposed problem, its related work, and the solution idea. For the survey track, the proposal must include a list of papers that you plan to base your survey on. The report must also propose a (biweekly) timeline for the execution of the project.
    2. Mid-term report: For research track, this report should outline the concrete research problem, technical details of the related work, and progress made so far solving the problem. For surveys, this report should outline a list of results, a summary of individual techniques used to achieve respective results, and a few open problem. The report must also highlight the
    3. Final report: This report should be in the format of submittable conference-style paper (paper template) — for eg., introduction, motivation, related work, design, implementation and evaluation sections for research track submissions; and introduction, background, existing work (possibly broadly categorized into multiple sections) and open problems sections for the survey track.

    Students are free to use hardware or cloud resources already available to them, and can also discuss with Saksham if they need help with accessing other hardware/software resources.

    Project Presentations: Students will also be provided an optional chance to present their work and findings to the class towards the end of the course. More details TBD.

    Deadlines

    • Project Proposal: 02/24
    • Mid-term Report: 04/01
    • Final Report: 05/04

    Submission Please use the following form to submit the project proposal and report.

Textbook

No textbook is required. However, the following classic textbooks are always helpful for reference:

  • Computer Networking (A Top-Down Approach), by J. F. Kurose and D. W. Ross, Addison-Wesley.
  • Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, by R. H. Arpaci-Dusseau and A. C. Arpaci-Dusseau
  • The Datacenter as a Computer: Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines (Third Edition), by Luiz André Barroso , Urs Hölzle , Parthasarathy Ranganathan

Academic Inegrity

Students are expected to follow the UIUC’s academic code of conduct.