Assignment 2 : A Bit of Reading

Due :

15 February

Points :

2

Teams :

You must do this one on your own.

Description

This assignment will ask you to find research papers on a topic related to operating systems and to prepare a short summary of each of those papers.

Pick a paper (not a book) from the bibliography in the text. You may also pick a paper from the ACM digital library or from CiteSeer or CiteULike on a topic that is closely related to Operating Systems (if you have any question on this matter, please show me a copy of the paper).

Pick several (5 would be best, but not all papers have 5 citations) references from the paper's bibliography.

Pick several (again 5 would be best) papers that cite the paper you picked at the start. That is, papers that have the original paper in their bibliographies. You will probably find CiteSeer, CiteULikeand other citation indexes useful for this.

Get copies of each of these papers - many will be available online, many will also be available from on campus as part of the ACM library, others you may have to find using inter-library loan.

For each such paper (including the original) write a brief (three paragraph or about 400 words) summary of the paper. This may include some of the same information that you will find in the paper's abstract, but should also reflect your view of the paper - was it interesting, were there particularly good points made and so on.

You should also include (for each paper found) where you found it (url etc) and in the case that
you got it via inter-library loan, please also send me a paper copy.

What to Submit

A single write up. The paper you pick originally should be first, followed by the papers it cites (earlier works) and then by the papers that cites it (later works).

Examples

I asked students who submitted good examples for this assignment in Spring 2007 for their permission to include their work here as examples. I have not changed these from the submitted versions. These may be found here and here.

You may not reuse these papers as your selected papers.

Write-ups for other assignments should look like these papers.