ITEE Home » Comp4200 » Materials » Assignments » COMP 4200 Computer Systems Architecture II (The University of Queensland, School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering)

Print version

The University of Queensland
School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
Semester One, 2004

Assignment 2

In this assignment you are required to

• select a topic in the field of Computer Architecture (see our suggested list)
• select an area to be approved by one of the lecturers within that topic, which represents an area of current interest in terms of industry trends or research
• write a 4-5 page paper in the style of an IEEE conference paper
• review the papers written by two other class members, through the lecturers (the review will be blind: the author will not know who is reviewing their paper)
  • the review form is in plain text: for each paper your review
    • copy it into an email, fill it in and send it to the course coordinator
    • we will go through how to do this in the Thursday 20 May 2004 lecture
• revise your paper based on the reviews

Finding references

• go to the library web site and see if you can find out how to access digital libraries; the two you will need are
  • IEEE Computer Society digital library
  • ACM digital library
• if you go directly to these sites, you may find you have to pay to read a paper
• there are also many free papers available around the net; try searching with
  • CiteSeer – but be aware that CiteSeer uses an automated web crawler, and its version of the source of the paper may be wrong (it’s worth checking against other papers which may refer to it)
  • general search engines – but do not rely too heavily on purely web-published material as it may not have been reviewed for correctness

Example:

• The paper “The Case for a Wireless Platform” is provided as an example. This is not published and is longer than the paper you’ve been asked to write but does provide an example of the general style of paper you are required to write.

Deadlines:

• choose a topic:email the coordinator with your first choice as well as 2nd and third choices no later than Monday 10 May 2004
• first draft of paper due Thursday 20 May 2004
• reviews due Tuesday 25 May 2004 by 5pm
• final paper due Thursday 3 June 2004 11:30pm

You will be assessed on

• the thoroughness of your review (20% of the assignment)
  • for each review, 10% broken down as
    • all points address (5%)
    • sufficient feedback to allow the paper to be improved (5%)
• your final paper (80% of the assignment)
  • appropriate structure (10%)
    • introduction makes purpose of paper clear, outlines rest of paper (5%)
    • logical progression from general issues to specific (5%)
  • proper use of references (15%)
    • cited appropriately in text in IEEE style (5%)
    • properly listed at end in IEEE style (10%)
  • sufficient material covered (20%)
  • showing understanding (25%)
    • material presented in a logical order (10%)
    • material related to topics you identify as important (15%)
      • not just a summary of your references
  • appropriate conclusions (10%)
    • draw together material to identify industry trends, potential future research areas, etc.

Your draft and final submission should be in PDF via the School’s electronic submission system. For how to create PDF, see http://studenthelp.itee.uq.edu.au/printing/ps2pdf.html. Your reviews should be edited in plain text in the given form, and also submitted via the electronic submission system.

---

Assignment 2 review results are available. The basis for marking (out of 10 for each review) was

• any reasonable attempt at giving feedback was awarded 10
• any minimal attempt at giving feedback was awarded 7
• only checking off the numeric scores was awarded 5

This mark scheme is intentionally generous as doing the reviews is an important part of learning how to do the final paper.

---

Philip Machanick and Simon Leung; for general course questions: comp4200@itee.uq.edu.au

Last modified: Monday, 10. May 2004 08:42 AM.