CS 530 Fault Tolerant Computing
Term Project Spring 2022 v. 3/14/2022
The term project can comprise of
•a thorough survey of a topic, with original insight
•a development of a new scheme, or a fresh implementation of an existing scheme
•novel modeling and analysis of an existing scheme.
You must demonstrate that you know how to research, are current in the chosen topic, have developed significant expertise in it and can communicate effectively about your work. You must be familiar with the recent (recent 48-60 months) developments related to your topic, and are aware of the research, development and commercial trends.
Documents needed: The dates may be subject to some dynamic adjustments.
Proposal: Due March 24, 2022
Progress report: Due 4/14/2022
Presentation Slides: Must be ready by 4/19/2022
Final report: Due 5/5/2022
Peer Reviews: Due 5/5/2022 for presentations and 5/8/2022 for Final Reports
Please use the IEEE/ACM two-column format for the Proposal, Progress report and the Final Report.
Proposal (suggest size: 2 pages):
•Part 1 Project Idea and Plan: It should include the Project title, your name and email addresses, one paragraph abstract, motivation, proposed approach and applicable references (must be cited in standard IEEE format). The title used should reflect what you plan to do, not the topic name provided below.
•Part 2 Sources of Information: identify the most applicable sources of information for your project, and mention a list of most applicable journals (minimum 3), conferences (minimum 3), names of the top organizations/research-groups (minimum 3) in that field, and one recent news or industrial report (at least one) all of them along with all related urls.
Progress report (3-5 pages): It should indicate that you have finished at least half of the work. It should include a summary of the findings, any refinements of the objectives as a result of the past study, what the final report will contain and the applicable references.
Presentation: Slides will be posted on the Discussion board 24 hours prior to a scheduled presentation. An eight to ten minute oral presentation using slides is required. Distance students also need to provide links to a video with their presentation. All students are required to view all presentations and provide a critique/evaluation.
Final report (8-10 pages, submit using Canvas/TurnItIn ): It should follow the two column format for IEEE conference papers. It should include
(i)the title, name of the author(s), name of the class and professor,
(ii)an abstract,
(iii)description of what is your contribution and what is new in your report,
(iv)introduction (modification, background and related work, objectives and methods),
(v)description of assumptions / schemes / models / problem-formulation
(vi)comparison/discussion/derivation etc of the results,
(vii)related recent developments in the field
(viii)conclusions (findings and suggestions for improvements)
(ix)references in the proper IEEE/ACM format. At least some must be recent.
(x)Use appendixes for details like raw data, listings etc., if needed.
Report must include appropriate figures and must have some hard data (tables/plots/screen-shots etc). A useful guide for writing papers can be found at: How to Write Your First Scientific Paper
Topics: The topics must be closely related to the course objectives. A a list of suggested topics is given below.
Evaluation: Among the factors that will be used for evaluation are significance and originality, thoroughness of research, depth of understanding displayed and presentation.
Possible topics
Here is a list of possible project topics. These are related to the Fault-tolerant Computing class and my own interests. Please consult me if you want to explore other ideas. The links provided may help you get started, but you need to do your own literature search.
1.Economic modeling of vulnerability markets A related article, another.
2.Computation of the quantitative reliability of a distributed file system. A related article.
3.Software test coverage models: Compare models that have been proposed to relate test coverage and defects found. A related paper.
4.Impact of correlated failures on reliability. Some related articles mine, Space Shuttle O rings, wall-street melt-down.
5.Limits of practically achievable software reliability or defect density. A related article.
6.Investigate the economics of software testing using actual field data. Related paper.
7.Develop model for economic tradeoffs due to security issues using actual data. Related paper.
8.Investigate quantitative methods for evaluating and predicting human reliability using actual data. Related paper, another.
9.Investigate reliability evaluation in the presence of correlated failures in software/hardware using data and analytical methods. Related paper.
10.Develop models for risk evaluation due to vulnerabilities, incorporating discovery and remediation. Related paper.
11.Obtain an elegant algorithm for generating antirandom vectors, or prove that existing procedure is an algorithm. Related paper.
12.Investigate antirandom testing where the internal nodes have antirandom values. Related paper.
13.Quantitative measurement of the impact of security breaches. Related article and another article.
14.Methods for quantitative modelling of corruption in society. Related paper..
15.Estimation of RPO, RTO so that a proposed disaster recovery scheme can be optimized Related paper, another paper
16.Modelling the advantage of geographically dispersed servers for disaster recovery. Related paper. Related paper.
17.Computation of the risk of security breaches: Consider technology, probabilities and costs. Note that “risk” includes both the probability of an event and the impact.
18.Using fuzzing to discover zero-day vulnerabilities a related article, and another.
19.Hypervisor security A related article.
20.Byzantine Fault-Tolerance A related article.
21.Cyber resiliency. A related report.
Note that presenting what is well known and can be found in tutorial articles or text books is not research.
If you doing a closely related project in some other class/project, please check with me. That is subject to the rule that you must obtain the approval of both instructors and share both reports with both instructors. One cannot get credit for the same work twice, however if the work is sufficiently extensive, getting credit for two classes may be justified.
Revisions: This document is subject to possible revisions. Please note the version number at the top.
