[ Project Information | Project Ideas | Project Proposal | Project Survey Paper | Midterm Paper | Peer Review | Final Demo | Final Paper ]

"Main" Project information

This semester's final projects can be found here. You need to be in the CS department network to access it.

Introduction

For the project, you can write a research paper or, if you prefer a more hands-on approach, build, design, implement an interesting system of your choice. There are six deadlines:
  • Project proposal. The proposal is a one page description of what your project will be. It should state the problem you are solving, why it is an interesting or useful problem, what software/system you will build and what the expected results will be. Essentially, the goal is to write what will look like the intro for a conference paper.
    Initial proposal of project topic is due on Tuesday, September 11th
    We will give feedback by Tuesday, September 18th.
  • Survey of area (related work) on topic (2-3 pages) due Friday, September 28th
    Discuss project topic with professor by Tuesday, October 9th.
  • Midterm draft Paper.This report should include a draft of your report's abstract, introduction, related work, and design section. These sections should be in good shape and close to what they would look like in the final report. Be sure that the draft's introduction clearly states what your project's goals are, why those goals are worthwhile, and how you're going to achieve those goals. In addition to these mature sections, the report should also have an implementation and evaluation plan. Describe how you plan to implement the system (esp. the details of how it situates in the OS environment) and what experiments you will run on your final system.
    It is due by Friday, November 2nd October 28th
  • Peer Review. You and everyone else will write a peer review of two or three other drafts (from other students). Your reviews will be given to you as feedback and constructive criticism on your draft paper.
    We will return our peer reviews to author within a few days.
  • Demo day.You will give a presentation, followed by a demonstration of your system in action to the entire class. We'll supply a laptop projector, so you should run your demo from your laptop.
    Demo day is in class on Tuesday, December 4th
  • Final report. Final report due Tuesday, December 11th

Ideas

You should feel free to choose any project you like, as long as it is related to storage systems, distributed systems or operating systems. It must have a substantial system-building and evaluation component. A successful class project usually have very well defined goals and is modest in scope (Remember, you only have 2.5 months to finish it). You could look for inspiration about hot topics in the on-line proceedings of recent SOSP, OSDI, Usenix, and NSDI conferences. Tips on preparing a paper appear appear here. Here's a list of ideas that we think could lead to interesting projects.  Start as soon as you possibly can!

  • Research physical layer covert channels
  • Research operating systems, architectures (FPGA), and languages for packet processors (See P4FPGA and P4
  • Research the cloud with the Supercloud
  • Operating system features to better leverage RDMA
  • New cloud-scale computing services, perhaps focused on applications such as the smart power grid, smart self-driving cars, internet of things, smart homes
  • Study the security and distributed systems properties of BitCoin
  • New systems concepts aimed at better supporting �self aware� applications in cloud computing settings (or even in other settings)
  • Building better memory-mapped file systems: current model has become outmoded and awkward
  • Tools for improving development of super fast multicore applications like the one in mini-project one. 
  • Software defined network infrastructure on the systems or network side (as distinct from Nate�s focus on the PL side)

The best projects will lead to papers you can submit to a good conference.  We're ok with projects that have CS 6410 content but are tied to work you are starting with a faculty member in the field.  The key thing is that projects need to be serious research activities that lead to publishable or at least very high quality papers (~10 pages, written very well and in a scientifically literate style, aimed at a clearly defined community).

Questions or comments? email hweather@cs.cornell.edu

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