Brown CSCI 2690: Cloud and Datacenter Operating Systems

Forming a Group

Ideally, you will form into groups of 2-3 to complete your projects. It is OK to work with people external to the class (see below on external collaborators). Otherwise, if you really want to work alone, please discuss your situation with me. Please use EdStem to search for group members, or, discuss right after class!

External Research and External Collaborators

You are allowed to use external research projects for the class project (this also applies to projects for other seminar classes). If you are the only student working on the project, that is fine as well. However, the following should additionally apply:

• The topic of the research has a clear overlap with the topics and themes of the class.
• You discuss the situation with me beforehand, before the proposal is due.
• You discuss with your other collaborators on the project and they are ok with you using the research as your class project.
• You clearly state what work has already happened and what new work you will do over the semester.
• If the project involves student collaborators external to the class, you must give sufficient evidence to prove you are leading or co-leading the project (e.g., you would either be first or co-first author if submitted for publication) and you must explicitly lay out which parts of the project you are responsible for.

• You clear the situation with me and the instructor of the other class.
• The topic of the research has clear overlap with the themes of this course.

Topics

I have made an EdStem Post that links to a document with project ideas; these are not meant to be exact suggestions, but rather, starting points for projects you can do. From these, you should develop your own hypothesis, plan to measure this hypothesis (which might include implementing or modifying a system), and final evaluation. As I mention in the doc, if you are specifically interested in later extending this project into an independent research project, you can meet with me to discuss what ideas might work well.

Proposal Deliverables (Due 9/30)

Your proposal should be a 2-page, double column document that states the following. References do not need to fit in the page limit. It should be formatted either using the Usenix style template OR the ACM Proceedings Sigplan template (double-column, 10-pt font). Please submit 1 proposal per group.

• Problem: What is the problem you are solving? Why is it important? Is it particularly important today in the face of recent trends?
• Project idea / hypothesis: What is your solution? How well does your solution solve the problem? Think of this as the hypothesis you are trying to test: what benefits will your system provide and in what scenarios will it provide this benefit (it might not be beneficial in all cases). If this is a reproducibility project in a different language, this is the hypothesis of whether the system can be faithfully implemented in the new language, or if the performance or API has to differ in any way.
• Novelty: How is this idea new compared to existing work? If this is a reproducibility project, explain why your effort will differ from the original implementation.
• Description of implementation effort that will be involved, broken down into a timeline.
• Plan for resources for both development and test: can you develop and evaluate on your local machine, in cloudlab, or in the department cluster?
• Evaluation Plan: How do you plan to evaluate your idea or system? What key metric will you use? What baseline will you compare against?
• Team members and breakdown of how work will be divided across team members
• Any challenges you may encounter

Initial Check-In Meeting (Week of 9/30)

More info coming soon.

Mid-semester project report (due 10/28)

More info coming soon.

Mid-Semester Check-In (Week of Oct 28)

More info coming soon.

Final Presentation (Dec 10/12)

More info coming soon.

Final Paper (Due 12/13)

More info coming soon.