CSS 434
Paper Review
Professor: Munehiro Fukuda
Student presentation dates: see the syllabus

1. Purpose

This reading assignment intends to have you experience the very initial step of research activity, i.e., reading research papers. Unlike reading textbooks, you are not required to acquire well-known facts but expected to summarize the key idea of each paper you have read and to discuss the contribution/drawback of the research presented in the paper.

Each student is expected to pick up a notable research/commercial project, to review one or more related papers, and to present his/her understanding of the research project he/she has chosen.

2. Reading Assignment

There are eight research projects whose accomplishment has been already published in conference and journal papers. The following shows the list of possible papers and web pages you should read. They are accessible from the web, retrieval from uw1-320-lab.bothell.washington.edu: ~css434/papers/ through sftp, or directly given from the professor's office:

A. Distributed Shared Memory

A-1. Ivy
  1. Li, K. and Hudak, P., "Memory Coherence in Shared Virtual Memory Systems", ACM Transactions on Computing Systems, Vol.7, No.4, 1989 pages 321-359 (available from the professor)
  2. George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, and Tim Kindberg, "Sequential Consistency and Ivy", Section 16.3, In Book of Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design, 3rd Ed., Addison-Wesley, 2001, pages 649-657 (Our textbook. If you choose this topic, your review should be more than the textbook's scope.)
A-2. Dash
  1. D. Kenoski, J. Laudon, K. Gharachorloo, W. Weber, A. Gupt, J. Hennessy, M. Horowitz, and M. Lam, "The Stanford DASH multiprocessor", IEEE Computer, Vol.25 No.3, 1992, pages 63-79 (available from uw1-320-lab:~css434/papers)
  2. Leonoski, D., Laudon, J., Joe, T., Nakahira, D., Steves, L. Gupta, A., and Hennesy, J., "The DASH Prototype: Logic Overhead and Performance", IEEE Transaction on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Vol.4, No.1, 1993, pages 41-61 (available from uw1-320-lab:~css434/papers)

B. Distributed Synchronization

B-1. SPEEDES
  1. http://www.speedes.com/
  2. Jeff Steinman, "The Event Horizon", Technical Report, Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology, JPL D-10029, November 1992 (available from the professor)
  3. Jeff S. Steinman, "Discrete-event simulation and the event horizon", ACM SIGSIM Simulation Digest, Vol.24 No.1, pages 39-49, July 1994 (available from uw1-320-lab:~css434/papers)
B-2. Time Warp
  1. David Jefferson, Brian Beckman, Fred Wieland, Leo Blume, Mike DiLoret, Phil Hontalas, Pierre Laroche, Kathy Sturdevant, Jack Tupman, Van Warren, John Wedel, Herb Younger, and Steve Bellonot, "Distributed Simulation and the Time Warp Operating System" Technical Report, UCLA, Agust, 1987 (available from the professor)
  2. Jefferson, D.R., "Virtual Time", ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, Vol.7 No.3, 1985, pages 404-425 (available from the professor)

C. Distributed File Systems

C-1. Sun NSF
  1. Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Maarten van Steen, "SUN Network File System", Section 10.1, In Book of Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, Prentice Hall, 2002, pages 576-603 (available from the professor)
  2. George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, and Tim Kindberg, "Sun Network File System", Section 8.3, In Book of Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design, 3rd Ed., Addison-Wesley, 2001, pages 323-335 (Our textbook. If you choose this topic, your review should be more than the textbook's scope.)
  3. Brian Pawlowski, Chet Juszczak, Peter Staubach, Carl Smith, Diane Lebel, and David Hitz, "NFS Version 3 Design and Implementation", USENIX Summer, 1994 (paper available at http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/pawlowski94nfs.html)
C-2. AFS
  1. George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, and Tim Kindberg, "The Andrew File Sytem", Section 8.4, In Book of Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design, 3rd Ed., Addison-Wesley, 2001, pages 335-344 (Our textbook. If you choose this topic, your review should be more than the textbook's scope.)
  2. M. L. Kazar, "Synchronization and Caching Issues in the Andrew File System", In Proceedings of the USENIX Winter Technical Conference, 1988. (available from uw1-320-lab:~css434/papers)

D. Replication and Fault Tolerance

D-1. Gossip
  1. George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, and Tim Kindberg, "The Gossip Architecture", Section 14.1.1, In Book of Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design, 3rd Ed., Addison-Wesley, 2001, pages 572-582 (Our textbook. If you choose this topic, your review should be more than the textbook's scope.)
  2. Randy Chow and Theodore Johnson, "Gossip Update Propagation", Section 6.4.4, In Book of Distributed Operating Systems & Algorithms, Addison-Wesley, 1998 pages 223-226 (available from the professor)
  3. Ladin, R., Liskov, B., Shrira, L., and Ghemawat, S., "Providing Availability Using Lazy Replication", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Vol.10, No.4, 1992, pages 360-391 (available from uw1-320-lab:~css434/papers)
D-2. Coda
  1. Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Maarten van Steen, "The Coda File System", Section 10.2, In Book of Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, Prentice Hall, 2002, pages 604-623 (available from the professor)
  2. George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, and Tim Kindberg, "The Coda File System", Section 14.4.3, In Book of Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design, 3rd Ed., Addison-Wesley, 2001, pages 584-591 (Our textbook. If you choose this topic, your review should be more than the textbook's scope.)
  3. James J. Kistler and M. Satyanarayanan, "Disconnected Operation in the Coda File System", In Milojicic, D., Douglis, F., and Wheeler, R., editors, Mobility: Processes, Computers, and Agents, ACM Press, 1999, pages 293-305 (available from the professor)

Decide one research project you are interested in, and reviews one or more readings related to the project. Some of them may be research papers published through IEEE or ACM, the others from a textbook section. Of importance is investigating the research project well enough to present your understanding in the class.

Email or talk to the professor by the end of the second week about what paper(s) you are interested in reviewing. The readings will be assigned in a first-come-first-service manner. Your presentation time slot will be scheduled depending on which paper(s) you want to read. Review the papers timely and get prepared for your presentation.

3. Presentation

Each student has 25 minutes to present his/her understanding of paper(s) and 5 minutes to answer questions from the other students.

Get prepared for your presentation using PowerPoint. Send your PowerPoint file to the professor by two days before your acutal presentation day, so that the professor can make it available through the class web. If you cannot complete your presentation file by then, you are responsible to distribute your hard copy of slides to the audience in the class.

The audience is expected to evaluate each student presentation according to an evaluation sheet passed by the professor. This sheet includes the following 10 criteria:

The depth of a speaker's understanding on the research project
Item 1 Did he/she well understand the paper he/she reviewed?
Item 2 Did he/she well summarized the main idea of papers?
Item 3 Did he/she give clear answers to questions asked by the audience?

The depth of a speaker's critique for the paper(s)
Item 4 Did he/she properly point out the contribution of the papers?
Item 5 Did he/she mention about any drawbacks of the ideas introduced in the papers?
Item 6 Did he/she express his/her own opinions to improve the quality of the papers, research, and projects he/she reviewed?

The quality of a reivewer's slides
Item 7 Did his/her slides help the audience understand the paper(s)?
Item 8 How about the number of slides, the amount of contents on each slide, and the use of colors, different fonts, and animation?

The effectiveness of a reviewer's presentation
Item 9 Did you understand his/her speech? In other words, did he/she well organize his/her presentation and do every effort to let audience understand his/her presentation, (i.e., alternative or additional explanations)?
Item 10 Was his/her presentation interesting? In other words, did he/she try to keep audience attracted to his/her presentation?

Each evaluation criterion will receive the following grade:
very good: 10
good: 9
fair: 8
poor: 7
very poor: 6

The audience will fill out all criteria and turn in an evaluation sheet to the professor upon the completion of each student presentation. Based on audience evaluation, the professor will grade each studnet presentation. Note that the audience evaluation is not 100% reflected to the final grade of your presentation. The professor will take into account all including the quality of your slides, your answer in a question-and-answer session, etc. to finalize your presentation grade.

4. Your Responsibility as Audience

You are responsible to fill out an evaluation sheet for each presentation except your own. Give useful feedback to your classmates. Your absence or malicious evaluation will cause 1 point reduction from your paper-reviewing grade for each presentation day. If you must be absent from the class, you should talk to speakers who gave their presentation you missed, understand their paper review, and submit evaluation sheets to the professor within a week.