The purpose of this class is to provide students with experience of 
leveraging the state-of-the-art technologies to solve real-world computer 
system problems. Students will break into project teams, each of which 
will define and deliver a substantial and impressive computer system 
project of their choosing. Each group will create a poster for this project 
for display at the VTURCS symposium in April. 

The example topics of the projects include compiler/architectural 
support for operating systems, reliability/security support for production 
runs, in-memory key-value store optimization on emerging architectures, 
programming support for non-volatile memory computing, distributed and 
parallel processing, resilience support for CPU/GPU, and power-failure 
tolerance for energy-harvesting systems. 

The class will meet only as necessary for progress reporting, discussions, 
feedback, demos and presentations. 

Formal prerequisites: A grade of C or better in CS 3114 and CS 3214. 
Each student must prove that they have obtained a grade of C or better 
in those classes. Students who fail to meet the prerequisite requirements 
should drop the class. 

Informal prerequisites: strong C/C++ programming 
skills and a passion for writing a research paper.