CptS/EE 562 Literature Survey Assignment

Spring, 2002

10% of final grade

(Updated February 15, 2002)

Bottom Line

Assigned: Thursday February 7, 2002

Due: Thursday March 7, 2002 in class (firm deadline).  Hand in hardcopy to class, and also email the TA (David McKinnon, mckinnon@eecs.wsu.edu) a copy (.pdf or .doc or .dvi preferred) too.  These will be put on the class web site, too, for others to read, so include your personal URL if you would like it linked in here.  Be sure to include your paper title and personal URL in your email to David so that he can easily copy-and-paste it into the web page.

Caveat: Start Early!  You are hereby warned…

Overview

In this assignment you will apply what you have learned in class to analyze 4-5 research papers (“primary papers”) in a related area (only 3 in some cases where it is a key area that only 3 are available for; you will have to explain that there are only 3).  You will also skim 3-5 papers (“secondary papers”) cited in these primary papers to get a better feel for the topic.  The basic idea is to analyze and summarize the state of the art in this field.

In all places in your report, you are expected to use technical terms carefully, as discussed in class and in Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance: Concepts and Terminology.  You should also be careful to have your citations in standard citation formats, and include URLS when they are available.

Organization of Your Report

Your report should be organized as follows:

You can cite the textbook too if it provides useful background on a specific issue, but include the section number probably to be helpful. 

If you cite any web pages as the source, unless an author is listed, use the name of the organization (BBN Corp, UCSB for UC Sanata Barbara, etc), then the title of the web page, then it URL.  Assume the date of publication is 2002, unless it says last updated in 2001 or something like that.

A sample format will be emailed to the class in .doc format at least 2 weeks before the due date.

Paper Sources

The sources below have two kinds of links: one for the conference or workshop itself (which usually contains the program, including the paper titles), and also the source for the conference papers (ACM or IEEE).  Some conferences don’t have online sources (e.g., expensive publishers like Springer and Wiley), but you can almost always find the paper online with google or looking at the author’s web pages.

The WSU library has subscriptions for the online publications for the IEEE and ACM.  They will not likely include most conferences and workshops in the last 6-12 months, so you will have to search for the paper like a Wiley or Springer paper.

(In general, if one cannot find a paper in their library or online, it is standard practice to email the author, and they are obliged as a matter of professional courtesy to send you an electronic or paper copy.  Few authors mind this, and zero of the grad student authors!  If you cannot, then the WSU library’s inter-library loan system can probably get you a copy, but I do not know how long it will take.)

We are focusing on papers published in the last 2-3 years, but if there is a need to include in your paper set a paper from as early as 1995, that is OK.  Below are sources for the last 2-3 years only.  Most conferences and workshops are every year at the same time each year (within a week), but some are every 18 or 24 months.

Most conferences are IEEE, and their overall paper web page is here.  You can look at tables of contents, abstracts, etc but have to have the IEEE library configuration/password to access the full papers.  Also, note that the conferences often have associated one-day or half-day workshops or “Fast Abstracts” or “Works in Progress” sessions that have shorter papers online that may be of interest (but do not count as a full paper in terms of your review number of papers).

Before I go into the list, note that a HUGE source of finding related work is CiteSeer.  It probably won’t be needed for you on this project, but it can tell you who has cited your paper, which might give you an idea of related work.

Top-Tier Conference and Workshops Completely or Mostly on Fault Tolerance

The International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), IEEE/IFIP (Note: FTCS and DCCA merged to become DSN a few years back.)

Some Middle-Tier  or Other Conference and Workshops Completely or Mostly on Fault Tolerance

Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS), IEEE

Workshop on Object-Oriented Real-Time Dependable Systems (WORDS), IEEE

Top-Tier Conferences and Workshops Often with Some Fault Tolerance

International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), IEEE

International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms (Middleware), IFIP/ACM

Some Middle-Tier or Other Conference and Workshops with Some Fault Tolerance

International Symposium on Distributed Objects & Applications

Journals

There are really no journals dedicated to fault tolerance, other than the IEEE Transactions on Reliability which has almost nothing to do with fault tolerant distributed systems.  Further, unlike many other fields, experimental “systems software” researchers do not usually bother with journal publications, because of their long lead times (1-3 years), so conferences are by far the preferred way to have “impact” with your research.  To say that for experimental systems programmers journals are “almost a joke” is a bit too strong, and would offend some from other fields (or those that run the journals), so I won’t!  They do have the one strong virtue of no (hard) page limitations.

Still, some top-tier journals that occasionally have fault tolerance papers in them are:

Some Example Paper Sets

Below are some paper sets that would be a good choice.  These are only the primary papers that have to be read and summarized, the few that will also have to be skimmed are not included here.

But you can come up with your own choice.  Just find a topic in the last year in the above workshops and conferences that interests you.  Find one or two papers from it, then choose 2-3 more papers from the papers they cite.  Voila!  You have your own paper set, on a topic that interests you!

But here are some of the possibilities:

[Note: this topic has too many papers, so you could subset or two people could do it.]

[Note: this topic has too many papers, so you could subset or two people could do it.]