Undergraduates and students in other departments are encouraged to contact me to discuss the class and if taking it makes sense for you.
Distributed systems explore how to use multiple computers to build bigger and better systems than are possible on a single computer. Single computers can fail, are limited in their processing and storage capacity, and can only be in one physical place. This course will explore exciting new directions in distributed systems research.
The majority of the class will involve reading recent papers from top distributed systems conferences, writing about those papers, and then discussing them in class. We'll cover one paper per class. Submit responses via our shared google drive that has one doc per paper. Email me if you do not have access to the drive.
The class also include a written mini-survey of an area you get excited about during the course of the class. In the mini-survey you will read 8-12 papers in an emerging area and then write a paper that: 1) synthesizes the common problem they are tackling, 2) identifies the common approaches they use, 3) relates the problems, approaches, and results across the papers, and 4) identifies new directions for research in the chosen area.
Paper Summaries: 33.3%
Paper Discussions: 33.3%
Mini-Survery Paper: 33.3%
By appointment.