Hide menu

Lab Assignment 5: Multiprocessor and Multi-Computer Systems

Table of Contents

Objective

The trend in the design of computer systems is quickly shifting towards multiprocessors and multi-computer systems. Nowadays, even desktop general-purpose processors are often composed of multiple cores. In this assignment, your task is to review a selected article on a multi-core, multi-processor or multi-computer system, and write a review report on the presented system.

Theoretical background

You should review the following resources before you start working on this lab:

  • Notes from the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th course lectures in course lectures
  • Chapter 17 (on parallel processing) in the course book

Article selection

The list of articles is available in the following web page:
http://www.ida.liu.se/~TDTS08/labs/lop.shtml

Note that one sub-group of two students should choose one article and work on it together.

Reading

Once you have selected the article, you should carefully read it and understand the contents. If you have difficulties in understanding any part of the article, you can read relavent chapters from the course literatures or some of the papers listed in the references. You can also use the Internet to search explanations of the abbreviations and terms.

To guide your reading, we suggest the following guidelines:

  1. Read the abstract and introduction, and classify the presented architecture, e.g. MIMD, SIMD, NUMA etc.
  2. Read the remaining sections and answer the following questions:
    • What is the presented architecture/approach?
    • Why has this architecture/approach been employed?
    • What are the advantages and disadvantages?
    • What is the application area?
    • What do the experimental results demonstrate?
    • What are the conclusions?
    • What is your overall impression on the article?
  3. You may compare the presented architecture/approach with those in the referenced papers.

Writing a summary

The length of the summary should be approximately 1000 words. The following should be presented or addressed in your summary:
  1. Title, author(s), publication authority, and the paper ID number in the list.
  2. Why have you chosen this article?
  3. Short overview of the article (but NOT a copy of the abstract or conclusion!).
  4. Classification of the presented architecture/approach.
  5. Short description of the advantages and disadvantages of the presented architecture/approach.
  6. Comparison with the referenced architecture/approach.
  7. Your overall impression, e.g. practical/impractical, interesting/boring etc.
  8. What have you learned through reading the article?

ATTENTION: You should write the summary in your own words. Any copy of texts, figures, and/or tables from the article is prohibited. However, you can make references to the original texts/figures/tables, e.g. "Figure 1 in Section 3 (page 4)".

Submission

When you have finalized your summary, please save it in the PDF format and send it to your lab assistant using the following e-mail addresses:

The email address should only be used for the submission of your lab report. A submitted report will be checked by the Urkund system, which consists of a large database of documents.

The Urkund system will compare your report with the documents in its database, and check if it is similar to any existed document. The documents in the database are taken from scientific journals and proceedings, from publishing houses, from the Internet, and more. When you submit your report to the Urkund system you will receive a notification from Urkund. After your report has been analyzed (takes at most 1 day), it will be forwarded to the supervisor together with the analysis results.

Resources


Page responsible: Zebo Peng
Last updated: 2023-09-26