Every student should complete a semester-long class project. The students can decide between a systems project and a research project.
A system project sharpens your systems skills and provides background on state-of-the-art systems, data structures and algorithms. For a successful systems project you will design and implement a systems component in C or C++, and you will deal with low-level system implementation details like memory allocation and management, cache-aware processing, parallel and concurrent processing and a deeper understanding of read/write performance trade-offs, and performance scalability. Systems projects will be carried out by groups of one or two students.
This year we will have two topics for a systems project.
A research project, on the other hand, aims at challenging the state-of-the-art. The goal is (i) either to better understand an open research problem through analysis and benchmarking, or (ii) to solve open problems through new designs and proof-of-concept implementations. The ultimate goal of a research project is to give a taste of research to students, and ideally lead to publications. When working on a research project, the student will interact with the instructor and the teaching assistants closely. Students will work in groups of three or four students.
We have a number of possible research topics below. The students can also propose their own project (subject to instructor's approval).
Impact of Sortedness on B+ Trees and Trees/LSM-Trees/Zonemaps
Persistent Deletes on LSM-Trees
Workload-aware data partitioning
Query-driven LSM-Tree Compaction
Build a learned index
Optimize memory allocation for LSM-Trees