COS-518 Syllabus

Schedule

This schedule is subject to change.

Date Topics Notes / Assignments Readings Presenter
Part 1: Systems organization and naming
Wed 09/11 Course overview, Principles of system design (lecture)
Read and review "Hints on System Design" Hints for Computer System Design  
Mon 09/16 System components and capabilities (lecture)
Read Chapter 1, section 2.1 of "Worse is Better". "You and Research" optional. Worse is Better, You and Your Research  
Wed 09/18 Systems challenging status quo (paper review)
Sign up to read one of the three papers by 9/14 LFS, Exokernel, Plan9 Ravi, Balkind, Erickson
Mon 09/23 Naming and Layering (lecture)
Read Chapters 2.1-2.2, 3, and Saltzer paper Saltzer End-to-End  
Wed 09/25 Client/server communication (lecture)
Read 4.0, 4.2, 4.3  
Mon 09/30 Naming networked systems (paper review)
Sign up to read one of the three papers by 9/25 SFS, UIA, CCN Y Lin, Ghasemi, K Lee
Part 2: Distributed Systems and Consistency
Wed 10/02 Fault tolerance - Atomicity, logging, and recovery (lecture)
Chapter 9 and System R paper System R  
Mon 10/07 Fault tolerance - Replication (lecture)
Chapter 8  
Wed 10/09 Time, consistency, and CAP (lecture)
Chapter 10 and Lamport paper Lamport clocks  
Mon 10/14 Strong consistency - Making it fast in the local area (paper review)
Sign up to read one paper by 10/7 Calvin, CRAQ, HyperDex Werner, Vithanage, Jayakumar
Wed 10/16 Strong consistency - Taking it to the wide area
Sign up to read one paper by 10/9 Gemini, Spanner, Walter Gossels, Tai, Frankle
Part 3: Scalable Storage and Data Processing
Mon 10/21 Scale-out systems (lecture)
Read Google Cluster and Vogel's EC paper Google Cluster Design, Vogel EC  
Wed 10/23 Weakening consistency (paper review)
Read Bayou and sign up for one other by 10/17 Dynamo, Eiger Schneider, A. Liu
Mon 10/28 Fall recess
No class. Project proposals due.  
Wed 10/30 Fall recess
No class.  
Mon 11/04 SOSP Conference
No class, but room available for group meetings  
Wed 11/06 SOSP Conference
No class, but room available for group meetings  
Mon 11/11 Big Data I (paper review)
Read original MapReduce paper, as well as one of other two MapReduce, MapReduce Online, Piccolo Mittal, Zou
Wed 11/13 Big Data II (paper review)
Read one of three papers Percolator, Spark, PowerGraph Rudeen, Gichohi, Ham
Part 4: Security
Mon 11/18 Information security principles (lecture)
Read Chapter 11, Thompson's famous Turing lecture (Trusting Trust), and Saltzer paper Saltzer Principles  
Wed 11/20 Untrusted Cloud infrastructure (paper review)
SUNDR, SPORC, CryptDB Edmundson, Ghasemi, Melara
Part 5: Concurrency and Performance
Mon 11/25 Designing for performance (lecture)
Read 5.5 through 5.8, 6.1, 6.2.1 - 6.2.5, 6.3  
Wed 11/27 Thanksgiving recess
No class  
Mon 12/02 Memory and thread management (paper review)
ESX, Scheduler Activations Fried, Nguyen
Wed 12/04 Taming concurrency (paper review)
Flash, SEDA, Tame Y Wang, Zhang, Sethi
Mon 12/09 Pushing key/value storage to its limits (paper review)
Read one of three papers SILT, MemC3, SSDAlloc  
Wed 12/11 Project presentations
Extended class (1:30-4:30pm)  
Tue 01/14 Project Write-ups Due
Due by 11:59pm EST on Dean's Date  

Last updated: Sat Jan 11 10:00:25 -1000 2014