Assignment 1A: Review of two research papers
Alessio Bucaioni
Global Software Engineering European Master (GSSEM)
abi11001@student.mdh.se
PAPER 1
Worst-Case Execution Time Analysis for Dynamic Branch Predictors, Iain Bate and Ralf Reutemann.
Is the paper well organized?
In my opinion the paper is well organized and conforms to the standards. It consists of the
following sections:
 Title, authors and affiliations
 Abstract
 Introduction
 Main sections
 Conclusions
 References
Actually some sections are missing (e.g. contents, list of tables, list of figures..) but it still
remains clear.
Comment to the following sections.
Title
In my opinion the title is well composed. It is shorter than ten words and it does not
contain any symbols or cryptic words. I think it is enough informative and exhaustive even
if does not say nothing about the analysis model for bimodal branch predictors.
Abstract
The abstract is very concise - only one hundred and twenty-three words - but it does not
have a lack of clarity. In the first eight lines the authors introduce the problem; then, they
move to the explanation of the work done and in the last three lines they show a possible
usage of it. No acronyms and references have been found in abstract.
Introduction
The introduction actually consists of three sections: Introduction, Branch prediction
techniques and Related work. In my understanding, in the first section the authors briefly
go through to the background and the definition of the problem – first paragraph - , their
contributions to the problem, – second paragraph – the related works – third and fourth
paragraph – and the structure of the paper – last paragraph. They also use some acronyms
and references for the first time in the paper. Each reference is well marked: their works
are clearly separated from the referred work.
In the others section, Branch prediction techniques and Related work, the authors go in
deep into the explanation of the background of the problem and they discuss a series of
other approaches highlighting the bad points of these.
Main sections
In the paper we can find three main sections: Static analysis of bimodal predictors, Globalhistory predictors and Evaluation of the approach. The first section is again divided in other
four subsections. I think this division is needed because they use an incremental approach
to explain their method: they first start with an overview of the approach; then they fix the
terminology, explain some assumptions, used later in the paper, and they explain two
analyses for two basics constructs. In these subsections we can find three tables, a figure
and a lot of formulas. I think each of them is shown with the appropriate notation. In the
third subsection we can also find a theorem with a proof. It is not a structured proof but
still clear and complete. In the other Main sections we have further analysis and an
evaluation of the approaches presented. The evaluation is supported by a series of very
well commented graph.
Conclusions
The authors take the stock of their work. In paragraphs one and two they summarize the
works done while in paragraph three they point out some benefits of their approach in
contrast to existing approaches. They also show limits of their work in paragraph four while
in the last paragraph they propose some feasible future works.
References
This section contains both references from book and from other paper. It is very clear and
well written. The only thing missing is the ISBN for the referred books. It could be useful to
search book in a fastest way.
Comment on the language used in the paper
Although the language is not so formal it is used in a very formal way. The composition of
the sentences is very clear and makes the reading easier. The authors, in the writing, use
the first plural person “we” and try to do not use frequently the same words. Obviously the
paper contains some technical words and acronyms related to the field of the work computer science of course - but each of them, especially the acronyms, are always
explained before being used.
General comments to the paper
As I said this is a good and interesting paper. All the things used conform to the standard
directives. The paragraphs are well structured. Figures and tables are always presented
with caption and comments. The formulas and the proof are not confused or unreadable
and well-marked.
PAPER 2
Improving Direct-Mapped Cache Performance by the Addition of a Small Fully-Associative Cache
and Prefetch Buffers, Norman P. Jouppi.
Is the paper well organized?
In my understanding the paper could be considered well organized. It contains the
following sections:
 Title, authors and affiliations
 Abstract
 Introduction
 Main sections
 Conclusions
 Acknowledgments
 References
Of course, some sections are missing but I do not think this affects the completeness of the
paper.
Comment to the following sections.
Title
Although the title is too long - fifteen words - and it contains a lot of technical words, it
gives a good idea of the topic which will be treated. However in my opinion, it has a lack of
appeal.
Abstract
Also the abstract is too much long. It’s quite boring because it looks like a list of presumably – feasible hardware techniques to improve cache performances and, even if
there are not acronyms or references, sometimes the sentences are hard to understand
immediately.
Introduction
Introduction is made up of only one section. It does not contain sections about related
works, problem definition and it is not exhaustive about the work reported in the paper.
Among others the only sentence which speaks about this it is quite similar to the sentence
used in the Abstract section:
(abstract sentence)This paper presents hardware techniques to improve the performance of
caches.
(introduction sentence) This paper investigates new hardware techniques for increasing the
performance of the memory hierarchy.
The introduction contains only two paragraphs. The first one is quite huge and tries to
explain the background of the problem. The paragraph two is about the paper structure.
In this section we find the first figure/table of the paper. Despite of the overall section, the
table is well inserted, with its caption and it is referred in the same page.
Main sections
Main sections are three. Each of them, except section two - the first section - have some
subsections. The first section specifies all the configurations interesting in that research.
The section three speaks about miss caching and victim caching while the last section is
about compulsory misses and stream buffers. All the acronyms are inserted without a
preceding explanation. In the section two and also forward in the paper, the author does
not always place the figures and the tables in the same page in which they are referred.
However they are always captioned and well formatted even if the font used is quite tiny.
Conclusions
In paragraphs one, two and three the author speaks about the results of his work. He point
out some benefits, especially for the stream buffers. In paragraph four he begins to speak
about some limitations of these techniques. In the paragraph six he shows a graph which
describes the improvement, in term of system performances, had with his techniques.
In the ending paragraph the author describes some possible future works.
Acknowledgments
This is the shortest section. The author just cites all the people which, in some way, helped
him.
References
In my opinion this section is enough clear and well don - except the reference five -.
However the references in the text – above - are inserted without any further information,
so sometimes it is difficult to understand what topic in the text it is related with the
references.
Comment on the language used in the paper
The language used in this paper, in my understanding, it is very simple and, sometimes, not
appropriate to the circumstance. The sentences are very long and in some cases this results
in a hard understanding. I do not agree with the structure of the paragraph. As I said before
I think the author uses too much technical words, acronyms and numbers.
General comments to the paper
The overall structure of the paper is good, but there are some mistakes in the sections. I
think the author just does not care about some rules so, as I said before, the work,
sometimes, looks quite fuzzy. For example the figures and the tables are indexed with the
same notation and this could lead the readers to get confused. One appreciable thing is
that the author always uses the italic for the core concepts.