Assignment 1: Review of two research papers
PAPER 1
Iain Bate and Ralf Reutemann, Worst-Case Execution Time Analysis for Dynamic Branch
Predictors
The paper is organized according to the common skeleton of the scientific paper where it starts
with the abstract followed by introduction, main section, conclusion and ends with references. On
the other hand, the main section of the paper has too many parts. The main section is combined
from five parts where one of them has four subsections. The related work part which is usually
included in introduction is represented as separate section of entire paper giving the reader an
impression that other authors’ works are very important in this document.
The title reveals the main purpose of the paper as it is concentrated on WCET analysis. On the
other hand the title is not encouraging the curiosity of the reader and does not represent any
question by itself.
The abstract is short and expresses main points of paper and the only thing that could be improved
is the short description of the research result. Furthermore, mentioning references to other papers
is not encouraged in the abstract.
The introduction opens the document with quite abstract sentences that do not capture reader’s
attention. Rather dry description of the problem follows leaving the reader with impression that
problem was tackled just because it previously “has received less attention”. On the other hand,
the introduction the does a good job by summarizing how the paper is organized.
The main sections of the paper are well developed and presented together with formulas, graphs
and tables for better algorithm understanding. Besides of many references that this paper is
relating on, it gives a short explanation of branch prediction techniques. When the part of related
works starts which does not seem to be in the correct place of the article. Method described in
many subsections and in very detailed way so that a reader with technical background could get
most of it.
Although summary and conclusion part confirms that the paper cannot stand alone and goes with
other publications, it represents the results and observations of this particular research well. The
conclusion follows the standard skeleton and ends with paragraphs about possible future works.
The paper includes a full list of references (more than 10) that are written in standard way.
The language of the paper is strongly related to the field and it is hard to read for someone not
familiar with specific terminology. In some parts scientific language is decorated in very expressive
way (e.g. worst case referred as unmanageable pessimism).
As for general comments, the paper is well written from scientific point of view but it is not
encouraging to read if you not completely into the subject. Anyone who is less familiar with the
terminology used in the paper has troubles understanding what he or she is reading it requires a
lot of background knowledge.
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PAPER 2
Norman P. Jouppi, Improving Direct-Mapped Cache Performance by the Addition of a
Small Fully-Associative Cache and Prefetch Buffers
The paper is well organized into logical sections although the names of sections and subsections
have a tendency to be quite long.
The title of the paper is a bit long and involves field specific terminology. Nevertheless it reveals
what the paper is about.
The abstract of the paper starts by describing future problems of the field and suggesting that this
paper could provide solution. The abstract is well structured, main topics are written in italics and it
has a well summarized outcome of the paper.
The introduction opens the paper by defining how important the topic is in a field of processors and
what problems the field is facing at a current time. The effect of importance increased by using
words like “dramatic” and exclamation marks. The short description of what paper is about and
how it is organized follows. It seems that paper skips the related work part at all.
The main section starts by explanations and images of how things work, giving some nice overview
with decent amount of numbers and facts. Then the amount of numbers increases and is hard to
keep up but the text is going nicely together with graphs that illustrate the subject. Almost all
sections and subsections are illustrated with tables and graphs as it is necessary for better
knowledge perception. Using italic text helps scanning the text more easily.
Summary and Conclusions are represented in rather long section of the paper where the results are
presented in yet another graph. The conclusion lacks analysis of pros and cons of the solution as
well as some kind of suggestion for future work.
There is a long list of references included that are well organized by standard formats although
some of references are rather unusual (e.g. Eustace, Alan; Private communication).
It is natural that the language used in the document is field related but in some parts it is
overwhelming. For example, in one sentence world "miss" is used 5 times "Misses in the cache that
hit in the miss cache have only a one cycle miss penalty, as opposed to a many cycle miss penalty
without the miss cache". Some parts of the paper use a lot of numbers and even if they are
represented in graphs and tables the paper is still hard to read.
Because of the matter of subject the paper is very numerical and needs a lot of visual
representation of the data. The introduction to the subject is quite capturing but it is hard to follow
the ideas because of the amount of numerical data.
Egle Samuleviciute
Stud. No. 860328-T141
ese09001@student.mdh.se
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