CIS 630 Term Paper

For the term paper, you will choose a distributed system area of interest to you and give a summary review of research for a specific topic in that area. The goal is to provide the opportunity for you to learn about a distributed systems topic in more detail by reviewing the research literature and comparing/constrasting the projects and results you find. For instance, you might give a historical perspective of how certain concepts developed and evolved. Or, you might focus on a particular technical problem and discuss specific approaches and solutions. This paper should be considered to be practice for writing similar documents during your graduate career.

The requirements for the paper are:

Minimum of eight references. These must be from journal articles, papers from conference proceedings, or other (non-web) published sources. Additional references may come from web documents.
Minimum fourteen pages, not counting figures. Maximum 1.5 spacing and 12 point font.
Paper topic and references due Oct. 28.
Paper presentation will be given during the last week of lecture. The presentation should describe the distributed system concept you studied, give references to the research work, discuss your analysis approach, and highlight the important points that you found. Presentations will be restricted to 8-10 minutes due to the volume of students in the class.
Final paper due Dec. 5, by 5:00 pm.

There are a number of places to find references on distributed systems. Our book and others have bibliographies. As mentioned, the book's website has an online list of references. Also, you can search on the web for keywords, "distributed," "systems," and "bibliography," etc.

For finding references, you should look at:

You should use wikipedia as a starting point in your research, but I expect you to follow references that it points you at to the original papers. It can also be a useful resource in identifying new keywords to help you search journals and paper repositories to find what you are looking for.