Fall 2017, CS 854: Experimental Performance Evaluation
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Mini Assignment:

Write a small and simple program to determine how fast you can read data from a disk.

To try to determine the bandwidth available from a single hard disk.
  Only a single rotating mechanical disk
  drive is allowed (Flash, SSD and RAID are not permitted).
Note that you must ensure that all data comes from disk and not from
  the file cache.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive study.
The purpose is to get you thinking about and exploring
  some of the issues that will be discussed in this class.

Please work individually as much as possible as I think that
there will be more to learn from a diverse set of experiments
than if everyone ends up conducting the same experiments.
It will also make the talks more interesting.

Create a presentation that will be given in class on Sept 15.

**** NEW ***
Please report all results in mega bytes per second
(i.e., 1024 * 1024 bytes per second). That way
we can compare numbers that different people measure.


Logistics:

You can bring and present using your own laptop but I suggest
also bring a USB device with a PDF of your presentation.

If you don't have a laptop to use for the presentation 
send me the PDF by Thursday Sept 14 at noon. 
Send the PDF of the presentation as an attachment.
I will put all presentations onto my laptop and bring it for
presentation in Friday's class (Sept. 15).
Your filename must all lower case and contain (in order)
your given name, a dash, and the first letter of your family name.
For example, my filename would be tim-b.pdf
Send the file as an attachment using the following subject line
Subject: 856 Assignment

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Assignment Presentation:

PRESENTATIONS will be done in class. 
They will be roughly max(7,120/N) minutes each 
(where N is the number of presentations).

MUST BE DONE IN POINT FORM
MUST email me PDF.
All presentations much have a least one slide containing each of
the 5 headings below.

The bullet points outlined below each heading are meant to 
provide you with some guidance. You must be sure
to include these as a minimum but also feel free to
include other important issues/aspects.

1) Environment 
 o What hardware and software was used?

2) Methodology
 o What is the metric of performance?
 o What experiments did you conduct and why?
 o How were the experiments performed?

3) Findings 
 o What results did you get?

4) Issues Faced / Lessons Learned 

5) Outstanding Questions / Problems
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