Course Information

Course description

In this course, we will discuss advanced techniques for building memory and storage systems. The course will cover a variety of latest research topics centered around the memory and storage systems that include the new and emerging hardware architecture, memory/storage systems software, memory-centric applications, near-storage computing, rack-scale storage, storage security and reliability, mobile/wearable/IoT storage, and large-scale distributed storage systems. In each lecture, we will discuss one or two research papers in each lecture. Through this course, students will learn not only the fundamental concepts of memory and storage systems via the lecture materials, but also the hands-on experience of building and evaluating a memory/storage-centric system via projects.

Prerequisite

  • ECE391 Computer Systems Engineering (or similar operating systems course)
  • ECE411 Computer Organization and Design / ECE511 Computer Architecture (or similar computer architecture course)

Class Lectures

  • Instructor: Jian Huang
  • When: 2:00 - 3:20pm, Tuesday & Thursday
  • Where: TBD

Who is this course for?

ECE598-MS is primarily intended for motivated seniors and graduate students who want to learn the latest research advances in memory and storage systems and are interested in building systems for memory/storage-centric applications.

Grading policy

  • Paper Review and Presentation (15%)
    • Students are required to submit their own questions (at least two) for each paper that will be presented.
    • Each student will have present at least one paper, the instructor will lead the discussions.
    • Both class and online discussions are strongly encouraged.
  • Assignments (30%)
    • Assignment 0 (0%): Student Information Sheet
    • Assignment 1 (10%): A timing experiment with memory system
    • Assignment 2 (20%): TBD
  • Project (55%)
    • Milestone-1 (5%): related work summary. Each team should submit an investigation of related work.
    • Milestone-2 (5%): submit a project proposal and discuss with the instructor. Proposal would be revised after discussion.
    • Milestone-3 (5%): in-class presentation of the proposed project.
    • Milestone-4 (10%): middle-term checkpoint (a short technical report with prelimary results) and progress discussion with the instructor.
    • Milestone-5 (10%): in-class demo and presentation.
    • Milestone-6 (20%): final report and source code.

    [The outcome of last year’s course projects has been published at ASPLOS‘19 and EuroSys‘19.]

TA

  • TA: TBD

Office hours

  • Where/When: Room 212, CSL (Coordinated Science Lab)
  • Feel free to send an email to make an appointment