Assignment 1: Review of two research papers (done individually)
Read the papers carefully and write a personally written review on each paper based on the
issues below (about A4 page normal sized text per paper, 300 - 700 words). The analysis
must be expressed in your own words.
PAPER 1 ……………………………………………………………………………………... Page 2
PAPER 2 ………………………………………………………………………………………Page 4
PAPER 1
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Page | 1
Author:
Title:
Iain Bate and Ralf Reutemann
Worst-Case Execution Time Analysis for Dynamic Branch Predictors

Is the paper well organized?
- The research paper is well organized. It has all the sections properly arranged and has
maintained all required guidelines for a research paper.

Comments:
 Title
- The title is clear and meaningful as per the subject matter of the paper.
- All keywords have been summed up in the title. That makes it easier for anyone to
search for the paper using the keywords.
 Abstract
- All Important points have been covered in the abstract.
- One compound sentence makes it bit difficult to understand. This would have been
better if short and simple sentences were used.
- It summarizes the problem, the related work and the improvements made on the earlier
work.
- It does not summarize the results obtained from the work.
 Introduction
- Introduction is good and creates interest to go through the remaining sections of the
paper. It is composed of simple and easily understandable sentences, which attract the
attention of the reader as well.
- It provides a basic background introduction to the topic which is a useful piece of
information in order to go ahead and understand the rest of the work.
- Reference to earlier work has also been summarized.
- The author has provided a brief justification on the reason behind the selection of the
topic.
- A compact summary of organization of the paper have been provided which helps the
reader to know content of the different sections of the paper.
- The Introduction section also comprises of:
o Techniques used in the work, where the authors have given an introduction to
the techniques they have used.
o Related work in detail, those have been performed in this field previously. The
section describing related work is well organized and with proper references.
 Main section(s)
- The main sections comprises of:
o Detailed work done
o Results
- The main section is well organized and supported by illustrations in form of tables,
figures and formulae.
- The subject matter needs some previous knowledge in this specific field. The paper has
got a lot of references which means a lot of parallel reading needs to be done mainly
while reading the main sections.
 Conclusions
- Firstly, the accomplishments in the work have been mentioned.
- Secondly, the improvements made on all the previous works have been mentioned
along with the proper references.
- Thirdly, the authors have provided a note of suggestion to the developers about the
pros and cons regarding the work.
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
- Finally, suggestions regarding future work have been provided.
References
- All references used all through the paper have been mentioned correctly in this section.

Language used in the paper
- The language was simple and easy to understand, except one instance in abstract.

General Comments:
- Overall the paper is good, and made quite a few improvements on previous works.
- The paper was targeted to the audience having some basic knowledge about computers and
microprocessors.
PAPER 2
Author:
Norman P. Jouppi
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Page | 3
Title:
Improving Direct-Mapped Cache Performance by the Addition
of a Small Fully-Associative Cache and Prefetch Buffers

Is the paper well organized?
- The research paper is well organized. It has all the sections properly arranged and has
maintained all required guidelines for a research paper.

Comments:
 Title
- The title is clear and meaningful as per the subject matter of the paper.
- Presence of keywords in title might help user to search for the paper easily.
 Abstract
- The abstract consists of the problem, benchmarking solution and the uses.
- Presence of a few definitions of few terms makes the abstract a bit long. The keywords
might also be defined in the introduction section.
- The abstract is complete and does not lack anything.
 Introduction
- Introduction is good and creates interest to go through the remaining sections of the
paper. It is composed of simple and easily understandable sentences, which attract the
attention of the reader as well.
- It provides a basic background introduction to the topic which is a useful piece of
information in order to go ahead and understand the rest of the work.
- Creating a situation with an example draws attention of readers.
- At the end a compact summary of organization of the paper have been provided which
helps the reader to know content of the different sections of the paper.
 Main section(s)
- The main sections comprises of the baseline design as well as details of work done.
- The main section is well organized and supported by lot of examples and illustrations in
form of tables and figures.
- The descriptions goes from basic level to higher level which makes the reader
understand the topic, method of work, evaluation and results step by step.
 Conclusions
- The evaluation and comparison of results of the work done has been summarized.
- The results have been compared using graph to show the final statistics.
- Suggestions regarding future work have been provided.
 Acknowledgement
- Acknowledgement section has the names of people whose help had made the
research paper successful.
 References
- All references used all through the paper have been mentioned correctly in this section.

Language used in the paper
- The language was simple and easy to understand throughout the paper.

General Comments:
- Overall the paper was well organized and quite interesting to read.
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