The objective of this course is to study the theory and practice of applied parallel/distributed computing. The second goal of the course is to provide students with an experience of research, paper reading and reviewing, and presentations.
Manish Parashar, Professor, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Office: CoRE 628 Phone: 445-5388 Email: parashar@ece.rutgers.edu
Monday and Wednesday, 9:30 - 10:30 AM in CoRE 628
Monday and Wednesday 4:00 - 5:20 PM in CoRE Bldg. 726
www.ece.rutgers.edu/~parashar/Classes/05-06/ece572/
This course will focus on applied parallel and distributed programming in general. More specifically, the course this spring will focus on Autonomic Computing and Communications and Autonomic Grid Computing, including concepts, models, requirements and challenges, programming systems, system/middleware/networking services and applications. This will be a research-oriented course consisting of reading, reviewing and discussing papers, conducting literature surveys, and a final project.
Introductory Parallel and Distributed Programming, Programming Methodology (OO Programming), Data-Structures, Computer Architecture. Familiarity with the UNIX operating system and knowledge of Java, C++, or C required. Recommended courses are:
ECE 566: Introduction to Parallel and Distributed Programming CS 503/513: Data Structures ECE 563/564 Computer Architecture
There will be readings (papers and/or book chapters) assigned for some of the classes. It is required that each of you read these before you come to class. You will also have to submit a short report about the readings by midnight, the day before the class. Failure to do so will result in automatic negative points. The report should briefly address the following issues:
State the main contribution of the paper. Critique the main contribution.
Rate the significance of the paper on a scale of 5 (breakthrough), 4 (significant contribution), 3 (modest contribution), 2 (incremental contribution), 1 (no contribution or negative contribution). Explain your rating in a sentence or two. Rate how convincing the methodology is. You may consider some of the following questions (use what is relevant): do the claims and conclusions follow from the experiments? Are the assumptions realistic? Are the experiments well designed? Are there different experiments that would be more convincing? Are there other alternatives the authors should have considered? (And, of course, is the paper free of methodological errors?) What is the most important limitation of the approach? What are the three strongest and/or most interesting ideas in the paper? What are the three most striking weaknesses in the paper? Name three questions that you would like to ask the authors? Detail an interesting extension to the work not mentioned in the future work section. Optional comments on the paper that you'd like to see discussed in class. You may find the article The task of a referee useful. Each paper is discussed in class. Discussions will be lead by one or more students and may include a brief presentation of the paper (5-7 minutes). You should follow this guidelines on how to handle these presentations, but in brief, you should:
Moderate at least one class discussion (the number of moderated discussions per student depends on the number of students in the class). The moderator is evaluated based on the number of active participants and the quality of the discussion. Participate in other moderators' discussions. Note that you need do this if you want an active discussion session when you'll moderate next time... Deliverables of the leading student(s):
Prepare a copy of you discussion plan for each class participant. Please send a plan to me in morning before class. Master critique (see guidelines) is due before the class following the class discussion moderated by your group. The leading student(s) does NOT need to turn in paper evaluations for that class.
Each student will have to submit and "state-of-the-field" review paper in an area of choice. This report should specify the problem/area studies, survey recent (~ last 5 years) approaches and classify them and discuss on their merits and demerits. A summary of projects will not be acceptable. A proposal outlining the focus of the paper and an initial set of readings is due on 03/01/06. The paper will be due on 05/01/06. Possible topics will be posted here.
All syudents taking the course required to complete a research/experimental project and submit a paper describing the results of this project. The project is intended to provide you with an opportunity to gain experience with research in a topic related to the content of the course. It is important that you start thinking about your project as soon as you can. The project schedule will be as follows.
A short (1 page) statement of what you want to do (objective, problem statement, challenges addressed, relevant references) will be due on 02/22/06. A 5-10 page update (more formal statement of problem/challenges, proposed approach, experiments/evaluations to be conducted, initial results if any, structure of the final report) will be due on 03/20/06. The final project report will be due on 04/05/06. This report will be reviewed and discussed by the students (using the review process discussed above).
Research Readings/Reports/Presentations: 30% "State-of-the-field" review paper: 30% Final Project (Final Report + Demo): 30% Class Participation: 10%