CSE 451 21sp

Optional End of Quarter Paper Review

Out: Thursday, 6/3/2021
Due: Friday, 6/11/2021, 11:59 pm
Turn In: Canvas
Grading: A paper demonstrating reasonable familiarity with the CSE 451 material covered this quarter and an honest effort to understand the chosen paper earns 0.1 points in the final course grade.

I have selected three papers from the most recent Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). SOSP is one of the top research conferences in operating systems. It is very competitive to get a paper accepted to it.

The exercise is:

Select one of the papers and read it.
Spend some reasonable effort on it. It is expected that it will be challenging to read - the intended audience is researchers in operating systems. I'm hoping that you will learn things from reading the paper, and that takes some work. At the same time, I'm not expecting you to feel that you understand everything the paper says. (That's usually challenging for anyone, including the target audience.) Spend "reasonable time" on it, and stop when you've reached the point of diminishing returns in what you're gaining per 10 minutes spent.
Create and hand in "appropriate length" report that addresses at least the following:
- Your name
- Title of the paper you're writing about
- What is the paper about? What issue does it address? Why is that issue important?
- What is the paper's contribution to knowledge related to its issue? How might the world be changed by the paper's results?
- What topics from CSE 451 this quarter were directly useful to you when reading the paper, and how were they relevant?
- What did you learn from the paper? How did it go beyond what we talked about this quarter?
- If there were aspects of the paper you ended up unclear about, what were they? Were there such large gaps between the background you got from 451 and the place the paper started from that you felt unsure if you understood what it was saying? If so, can you describe what you think was missing from your background knowledge?
Short and straight to the heart of the matter, rather than exhaustive detail, is always better. "e=mc²" rather than "If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/V². This equation is approximated by neglecting magnitudes of fourth and higher orders of a series expansion." (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

Here are the papers. I've ordered them from what I guess is least challenging to most challenging. (To see the full paper, click on the big red PDF buttons on the pages these links take you to.)