COSC440

COSC440 Writing assignment (30%)

In this assignment, students are required to write a research paper on any topic related to OS. You should read a number of OS research papers from recent OSDI and SOSP conferences before choosing a topic and writing. The paper should be precisely six-page long in IEEE format (you may find the latex IEEE style file from the course website), excluding references and figures.

The report can address any issues related to the design and implementation of OS. Topics include, but not limited to, operating systems, file and storage systems, distributed systems, mobility, security, embedded systems, fault tolerance, system management, peer to peer systems, and virtualization. The report will be graded based on clarity, correctness, relevance, interest, significance, originality, and technical feasibility.

You should start the reading earlier so that you will have enough time to find a topic interesting to you and read more related papers on the topic. You need to read these papers to understand the problems and limitations of the existing solutions. From here on, you will be able to find the new problems and figure out some possible solutions.

The report should at least consists of the following parts:

  • Introduction: background of the related area, the problems, and the issues;
  • Related work: different schemes and solutions for addressing the problem, with analysis of pros and cons of the solutions and evaluation of the significance of their contributions;
  • Your proposal: your original ideas, implementation plan, feasibility of the proposal, interesting discussions, and comparison with related work;
  • Conclusions: summarize the contributions of your report and if possible perspectives of the related area.

A good report will demonstrate that the student:

  • Have a good understanding of the problems and issues of the related area;
  • Have a good understanding of the solutions in related work;
  • Have an interesting and novel proposal with sound technical implementation plan;
  • Have clearly and correctly described previous related work;
  • Have clearly articulated the significance of the problems, issues, solutions and contributions.
Please format your article in the IEEE standard double-column template.

Submission due date: 4pm, Monday 16 October

You should have a look at How to read a paper, which tells you how to analyze an academic article and get the essence out of it.