What Should Graduate Students Know Before Joining a Large Computer Architecture Project? Shubhcndu S. Mukherjee Computer Sciences Department University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, Wisconsin 53706-1685 USA (shubu @cs.wisc.edu) Abstract Large projects have become common in the computer architecture research community today. This article examines some o f the things that graduate students who become involved in such large projects should be aware of. The purpose o f this article is not to advocate that a graduate student should join a large project; rather, this article should be viewed as an aid that helps a new graduate student make this decision. : 4.0 3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 1 Introduction In recent years academia has seen the proliferation of large computer architecture projects that involve several graduate students, faculty, and research staff. The worldwide computer architecture home page I lists more than 40 projects with four or more researchers. This trend is also illustrated by the gradual rise in the average number of authors per paper every year in the International Symposium on Computer Architecture or ISCA (Figure 1). If projects involving only one graduate student and one faculty advisor dominated, then one would expect this number to be very
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