Term Projects for CS612

Projects are usually done by teams of two students and are designed to give you an idea of what is like to do research in the area of compilers and high-performance computing. Towards this end, you and your partner are expected to complete "typical" research activities. These include,

• picking a partner that you can work with,
• meeting with your project supervisor at least once a week.
• doing background reading on the topic,
• designed novel algorithms or systems to solve the problem,
• building an prototype implementation of the system,
• presenting your work and results to the class,
• writing and submit a report about your activities, and
• developing a web page that describes your work.

Expectations

1. Do a literature search, starting from the papers we gave you for your topic
2. Read relevant papers
3. Decide whether you want to do a survey paper or term project
4. If you are doing only a survey paper:
   • Give a presentation to the class of what you have learned reading the papers
   • Write a 10-12 page survey paper (due in the last lecture) summarizing the papers you have read. The paper should not be a collection of extended abstracts. Rather, the goal is to summarize the state of the art in the area you are studying, explaining what has been done and what remains to be done.
   • The survey paper can be in the form of a website, if you choose
   • You must also do the third assignment, which has been posted online
5. If you are doing a term project:
   • Give a presentation to the class of what you have learned reading the papers
   • Pick a problem and work on it until the end of the semester
   • Write a 10-12 page paper (due in the last lecture) on the work you did. The term paper should contain a section on previous work, as all papers should, but the section can be relatively short (compared to a survey paper). The format should roughly be the ACM conference paper format
   • In this option, you do not need to do the third assignment
6. Regardless of whether you choose to do a survey paper or a term project, you must turn in a critique of every presentation given in class. What is your evaluation of the talk? The material? The presentation? The way in which the person answered questions? Did the talk omit important papers in the area? Did it represent the referenced papers correctly? What advice would you give to the presenter for improving his talk?