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Final Exam

General Rules

• This is a 24h take-home exam.
• The exam runs from 12:00 (noon) on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 to 12:00 (noon) on Wed, 11 Nov 2009
• The basic exam question is available now, but the papers you are asked to analyse will be made available only at 12:00 (noon) on Tue, 10 Nov 2009.
• The papers will be available electronically via this WWW page. Email Gernot if you need hardcopies so we can try to arrange something.
• The total exam is worth 35 marks.
• You will lose 3.5 marks for each hour, or part thereof, your submission is late.
• You are not to get any help from anyone on the exam. You should not talk to anyone else about the exam from the time you receive the full details until you submit your solution.
• You have the choice of three different ways to submit your solution:
  1. Submit a hardcopy by the deadline (12:00 (noon) on Wed, 11 Nov 2009). It must be accompanied by the signed certification of sole authorship. It must be submitted to Gernot Heiser, Kevin Elphinstone, Aaron Carroll or Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale in person. In addition, you must submit an electronic version (PDF) within three days of the end of the exam.
  2. Submit an electronic copy (PDF), via the give system, by the deadline, and submit a hardcopy, including the signed certification of sole authorship, within three days of the end of the exam.
  3. Submit, via the give system, by the deadline, a digitally signed electronic copy (PDF). This must contain your full name, student number, date, and the following declaration:

     I hereby declare that this submission is my own work, and I have not received any help whatsoever.

     The file must be signed with PGP/GPG, be ASCII-armoured, and have an extension .pdf.asc. This is achieved (when using PGP 6.0 or later) with the command:

     pgp -sa <file>

     or, using GPG, with the command

     gpg -sa <file>

     See the GPG Example for how to use GPG for signing and check that you've got it right.

Notes on electronic submissions

1. In the cases where a paper submission is also required (cases 1 and 2 above), the electronic submission, when printed on a CSE printer, must appear exactly as the submitted hardcopy.
2. The submission must be in PDF format (and use the extension .pdf).
3. The submission must be made via the give system, mark name "exam".
4. If using give, check you can submit your exam (or any exam report) well before the deadline. We will have little sympathy for submission issues if you raise them five minutes before the deadline.
5. Make sure that you only use Type-1 fonts, as others are unprintable on some printers. LaTeX users can ensure the use of Type-1 fonts by producing a PostScript file with the command dvips -Pwww -o file.ps file and then converting this to PDF.

Notes on digitally signed submissions

1. Familiarise yourself with PGP (or GPG). We will not provide tutorials on this, it's up to you. Get yourself a public key if you don't have one. Follow the recommended safeguards to keep it secure. It will be like your normal signature!
2. See Gernot or Kevin with your key and proof of identity. He will then sign your key.
3. This signed key can then be used to sign your exam. (Feel free to get others to sign your key as well.) If you get your key signed after the exam, make sure that it is the same key as used for signing the exam.
4. Make sure that PGP or GPG is installed on the system you are going to use to write your exam, and that you can use it reliably. If you stuff up, it's your own problem.

Specifics

• Paper 1
• Paper 2

You are to read, understand, and critically assess the papers. Questions you may want to ask yourself for each of the papers:

• What problem is it trying to address?
• How well does it address the issue?
• How well do they motivate the value of solving the problem. Is the problem a real problem? Is the problem/work significant?
• How does it relate to other work? Does it reference relevant other work (as far as you can tell), does it do the other work justice? Has it all been done before?
• How technically sound is it? Does their argumentation, the presented data convince you? Should they have been looking at other issues?
• How good are the results?
• How good/deep is their analysis?
• How easy would it be to reproduce their results?
• How general are their results? Can they be applied to other systems? Did we learn some general truth?

Note that all papers are in fact published (and should therefore meet certain quality standards one hopes :-). In order to get an idea of what program committees at top systems conferences are looking for, have a look at this classic!

What to submit

I am intentionally not specifying a length limit. However, I strongly encourage you to be concise. Lengthy submissions will almost certainly be unfocussed and waffly. I cannot imagine a decent job in excess of 3000 words, and would imagine that a very good submission would stay well below 2000 words total. If your report gets longer than this you should step back and try to focus.

Note: In order to help us to perform an unbiased assessment of your report, we would appreciate if you do not put your name on the report itself, only your student ID. Of course, your name must appear on the certificate that is attached to the report. However, as long as this certificate is on a separate page, we can assess the reports without looking at names.

What I will be looking for

Previous exams