Assignment handed out on Sunday, March 11, 2001
Final Project Overview
Your ultimate goal is to write and present a proposal that wins an
award from the aD Uni funding board. You will work in the same pairs
that have already been assigned. The process will proceed as follows:
- By 3/13: Submit your topic and a brief abstract of your
approach to your TA
- By 3/16: Submit an outline of your proposal to your TA
- 3/20: Give a practice talk to your TA; submit a 10 page proposal to
your TA
- 3/21: Give a 45 minute presentation to your recitation section.
Reserve 15 of the 45 minutes for questions.
The proposal + the presentation counts for 20% of your total
grade. Your grade will depend on how well you convey your ideas
and how well you answer questions from your peers and the TA.
After the presentations are delivered on 3/21, each recitation section
will be responsible for choosing 1 team to represent them at the
finals on 3/22. This will be done via a vote. Each member of the
recitation section (including your TA) will have 1 vote. In the case
of a tie, a second vote will determine who goes on. In the second
vote, those team members involved in the tie will not vote. If the
vote is still tied, the TA's vote will be used to select the winner.
The final presentations will be on 3/22. These presentations are
delivered by the teams voted to represent their respective recitation
sections. The presentation will be 40 minutes in length, with 30
minutes of questions from the aD Uni funding board (the staff, TA's,
and a few others). These presentations will account for the remaining
20% of the final grade for each member of the respective recitation
sections' grades. As before, the grade will depend on how well your
representatives convey their ideas and how well questions from the
final judgement board and the aD Uni students are answered.
Your Proposal
Your proposal will be a response to an NSF RFP
around Network
Middleware. Your proposal must describe your approach to
developing a sofware layer that addresses the conflicting issues of:
- optimizing an entire network for a single application
- sharing limited resources for the common good of all applications
For this project, you must choose an application you wish to optimize.
A rule of thumb: choose an application where the impact of fully
optimizing the application significantly impacts network performance.
The less that optimizing your application impacts network performance,
the easier your proposed solution will be to develop. The tradeoff is
that your proposal will be easier to shoot down. The more that
optimizing your application impacts network performance, the more
difficult your proposal solution will be to develop. In this case, a
good proposed solution will make your proposal easier to defend.
Take telnet sessions, for example. As we discussed in lecture,
building session support at the lowest network layers can cause huge
performance issues for streaming protocols. TCP is a "middleware"
layer that supports sessions with some tradeoffs. TCP does not affect
streaming protocols because streaming protocols can rest on UDP.
Contact the teaching staff with any questions.