Assignment 1 : A Bit of Reading

Research in the Computing Literature.

 Due :

16 October

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.

Find a recent paper in the field of Operating Systems.   Several suggested start points may be found here.   From the bibliography, pick one or more papers cited (you can also choose entire books, but that would be a lot of reading to do).    Note that some papers will be found in journals (such as "Communications of the ACM"), others in proceedings (a collection of papers from a conference) and others in books that are collections of papers.   In many cases, the sources for these papers may be found online: try citeseer, google scholar or the ACM web site (you should be able to read papers on this site from on campus), others may only be available from the print copies of the sources - if we do not have these in our library you can use interlibrary loan to get copies.  Do not use whitepapers, advertising or online documentation. 

You may also pick papers that cite the original, or papers cited by one of the papers you pick. 

Find a total of seven papers (the original and six more).   For each such paper (including the original) write a brief (400-600 words) summary of the paper.   This should include a description of the main points made, and a brief summary of your reaction to the paper.   You should keep in mind that most of these papers will have been peer-reviewed, so unless you're pretty sure that the content is nonsense don't say so.  

Give a "table of contents" indicating the relationship among the papers (who cited whom) and the dates of publication.

You should also include (for each paper found) where it was published (journal, date, pages), where you found it if you got a copy online( complete url please) and in the case that you got it via inter-library loan, please also send me a paper copy.  

What to Submit

Submit to me a PDF version of your write up. 

Example

This file contains a sample PDF.   Only one review is given (and a nonsense review to show structure).    Your submission does not have to look exactly like this, but the same information should be there in a similar format.    The  bibliographic information does not have to follow any specific format, as long as the important information is present and readable.   This example was written in LaTeX and the LaTeX source is here.