INF5071 - Autumn 2010

Project description for INF5071 / Fall 2010

Project Details

This project will be conducted in pairs (unless a valid reason for working individually is provided). It should consume roughly 30 hours per person for a total of 60 hours per pair. The project consists of nine milestones:
  1. Finding a partner.
  2. Selecting and submitting a topic (as soon as possible, first come first serve).
  3. Delivery of the project plan by email to (paulbb at ifi.uio.no) by 24. September.
  4. Discussion of project plan on 30. September.
  5. Production of results.
  6. Production of project presentation.
  7. Delivery of the project presentation by email to (paulbb at ifi.uio.no) by 12. November.
  8. Presentation of your results on 19. or 26. November.
  9. The oral exam where the assignment is a minor topic (date 14. December).

Finding a partner

If you require help in finding a partner please send an e-mail to (paulbb at ifi.uio.no) and we will coordinate it so everyone has someone to work with. To aid in this process select a few topics or key-words of your interests, and we will try to match people based on these criteria.

Project plan

The project plan is not meant to be a formal project plan as taught in software engineering. That alone would consume the entire allocated time. Instead, we expect an informal description that includes the following:
  • What do you want to measure and what are your metrics?
  • If applicable, how is your testbed setup and why?
  • How do you intend to perform the experiments (e.g., parameters to benchmark programs)?
  • Your schedule (i.e., milestones: when do you expect to have a task completed by?)
  • How do you want to present the results visually (what will be on the axes of your graphs)?
Writing this requires that you have already downloaded and taken a look at the tools that you intend to use. Please refer to this example of an appropriate project description. We expect the project description to be a separate document.

Selecting and submitting a topic

We have provided a list of topics we find interesting, but if none of these topics are of interest to you or are already taken, we encourage you to come up with your own suggestions. The only mandate is that it be related to efficiency in some manner. Wether you come up with your own project idea or select one from the list below send an e-mail to (paulbb at ifi.uio.no) with the name of yourself and your partner and we will let you know if it is approved/available.
  • Performance of services within the cloud

It is becoming increasingly common to purchase service from cloud operators such as Amazon's EC2 (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/) or Rackspace. As a result in this shift towards renting services in the cloud, how well do various applications cope in such a scenario? Do the providers specialize in providing certain services, how, and why? How is the distribution of data centers and how can this effect your application?

  • Comparison of threading libraries

There exists a number of libraries, such as POSIX Threads and Boost Threads, for threading applications, i.e., to allow for running multiple threads of execution within a processor. How do the various libraries compare to eachother? In terms of functionality, cleaning up, portability, scalability, spawning of threads and so forth?

  • End-to-end latency for VP8 video-conferencing

VP8 is a new video codec released and promoted by Google. VP8 is a general purpose video codec and can in theory be used for any number of applications including video-conferencing. Video-conferencing requires a very low latency in order to provide a sufficient Quality of Service. As such, it is interesting to measure the latency of different configurations of VP8 end-to-end latency from a web camera to the display. Implementations for VP8 are available via ffmpeg and the WebM project

For further inspiration, you can also take a look at the topic suggestions from 2008 and from 2009.

Current Pairs and Selected Projects

Lastname Firstname Project