Seminar on Concurrent Data Structures

CS-0368-3378-01

Prof. Yehuda Afek

Instructions and requirements below after the schedule.

Spring 2009

 The seminar takes place on SUNDAYS at 14:00 Kaploon 319

Date	Talk	Presenters	Materials
3/15	Multi core back ground	Gilad	slides
3/22	Mutual Exclusion	Shiran Mizrachi	Slides
3/29	Mutual Exclusion, part II,	Oded	Slides
4/19	Linearizability	Mila	slides
4/26	Queue Locks	Guy	slides
5/3	Queue	Niv, Tal	slides
5/10	Link Lists	Lior	Slides
5/17	Concurrent Qs, ABA problem, Stacks, Elimination	Shiran Haliva, Eran	Slides slides
5/24	Dynamic Hash tables	Tom, Annie
5/31	Barrier Synchronization	Tomer
6/7	l-exclusion	Alon
6/14

In the first meeting I will provide an overview and background. In addition I will provide a list of topics with associated papers that cover the fundamentals of the seminar subject (at least some of them). Thereafter, every week, starting in the 4th week, two of the participating students will present one of these topics (papers) to the group. The goals are: 1. to study the area, 2. practice in preparing a presentation and delivering it, 3. bring the students to the front of the research in this area.

The students leading the discussion in a given week should read the paper(s) carefully and prepare a presentation discussion on the paper to be held in the meeting.

Participants are required to:

• present a research paper(s), and lead a discussion on the topic;

• Each presentation must start with a 3 or 5 minute background, and motivation for the current paper,
• Then, each presentation should provide a quick overview of the key ideas and the paper in a nutshell. As if you have to tell the entire presentation in one minute. This part is very important, both for the audience and for me to see that you understand the topic at a high level, that you understand the main points and able to distinguish them from the details.
• Then the full presentation itself, with the details.

• Write a 1-2 page report which critically evaluates the papers/topic (flaws in the model, not exciting when compared to related work, mistakes, etc.), try to give a vague or specific idea how to improve the paper, and propose what else can be done with this topic;
• Each participant must email me a short evaluation for each of the others’ talks by Wednesday 7 PM of the week of the talk.
• Each participant must attend all the talks of the seminar and actively participate in the discussions.

Your presentation should cover the motivation for the problem as well as the technical parts of the paper in detail. Assume that the other participants know nothing about the subject.  You are encouraged to deviate from the logical structure of the paper and present it in the most lucid (clear) way.