Systems and Networking Ph.D. Qualifier Exam

Spring 2007

Examining Faculty

Godmar Back (exam chair)
Kirk Cameron
Ali R. Butt

Examination Format

This page was last modified Wed Nov 1 01:17:15 2006.

Written Questions

Each year, the Systems/Networking faculty publishes a reading list of 10 – 15 papers in the second half of Fall semester and a list of integrative research questions during the winter break. The deadline for students to provide written answers to the research questions is usually within first few weeks of Spring semester. The goal of the written exam is to evaluate the student’s ability to creatively integrate content from the constituent systems research areas.

See Past Exams.

Oral Exam

The written exam will be followed by an oral exam, where the student is expected to defend his/her solutions. Unless specifically requested, the student is not expected to make a formal presentation. In the oral exams, faculty may ask questions about any paper in the reading list to assess the student’s understanding of the subject. Oral exams will be scheduled individually for each student.

Assessment

After the oral examination, the examining faculty will determine the student's score for the examination process. The score is between 0 – 3 points, depending on the student's performance on both the written and oral components. These points may be applied toward the total score of 6 points necessary to qualify for the Ph.D. The assessment criteria, as defined by GPC, are as follows:

3: Excellent performance, beyond that normally expected or required for a PhD student.

2: Performance appropriate for PhD-level work. Prime factors for assessment include being able to distinguish good work from poor work, and explain why; being able to synthesize the body of work into an assessment of the state-of-the-art on a problem (as indicated by the collection of papers); being able to identify open problems and suggest future work.

1: While the student adequately understands the content of the work, the student is deficient in one or more of the factors listed for assessment under score value of 2. A score of 1 is the minimum necessary for an MS-level pass.

0: Student's performance is such that the committee considers the student unable to do PhD-level work in Computer Science.

Reading List

K. Sankaralingam, R. Nagarajan, H. Liu, J. Huh, C.K. Kim D. Burger, S.W. Keckler, and C.R. Moore. Exploiting ILP, TLP, and DLP Using Polymorphism in the TRIPS Architecture, 30th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), pp. 422-433, June 2003.
Song Jiang and Xiaodong Zhang, LIRS: an efficient low inter-reference recency set replacement to improve buffer cache performance, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGMETRICS Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, (SIGMETRICS'02) , Marina Del Rey, California, June 15-19, 2002.
Xiaodong Li, Zhenmin Li, Pin Zhou, Yuanyuan Zhou, Sarita V. Adve, Sanjeev Kumar. Performance-Directed Energy Management for Storage Systems, IEEE Micro, vol. 24, no. 6, pp. 38-49, November/December, 2004.
Rajagopalan Desikan, Charles R. Lefurgy, Stephen W. Keckler, and Doug Burger, On-chip MRAM as a High-Bandwidth, Low-Latency Replacement for DRAM Physical Memories Technical Report TR-02-47, Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin, September 27, 2002.
Mark Oskin, Frederic T. Chong, Isaac L. Chuang, John Kubiatowicz, Building Quantum Wires: The Long and the Short of It. 30th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), pp. 374-385, June 2003.

A. Rowstron and P. Druschel, Pastry: Scalable, distributed object location and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer systems. IFIP/ACM International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms (Middleware), Heidelberg, Germany, November 2001.
Edmund B. Nightingale, Kaushik Veeraraghavan, Peter M. Chen, and Jason Flinn, Rethink the Sync. 7th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), Seattle, WA, November 2006.
Martin Rinard, Cristian Cadar, Daniel Dumitran, Daniel M. Roy, Tudor Leu, and William S. Beebee, Jr., Enhancing Server Availability and Security Through Failure-Oblivious Computing. 6th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI), San Francisco, CA, December 2006.
Landon P. Cox, Brian D. Noble, Samsara: Honor Among Thieves in Peer-to-Peer Storage. 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Bolton Landing, NY, October 2003.

Paul Barham, Boris Dragovic, Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Tim Harris, Alex Ho, Rolf Neugebauer, Ian Pratt, Andrew Warfield. Xen and the Art of Virtualization. Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles. 2003 Bolton Landing, NY, USA Pages: 164 - 177
Bryan Ford, Jacob Strauss, Chris Lesniewski-Laas, Sean Rhea, Frans Kaashoek, and Robert Morris. Persistent Personal Names for Globally Connected Mobile Devices Proceedings of the 7th Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, 2006
Galen C. Hunt, James R. Larus et al. An Overview of the Singularity Project. Microsoft Research MSR-TR-2005-135
Junfeng Yang, Can Sar, and Dawson Engler. eXplode: a Lightweight, General System for Finding Serious Storage System Errors. Proceedings of the 7th Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, 2006