Distributed Systems enable large-scale modern applications ranging from internet-scale applications like Facebook, and Google to web-based services like AWS, Azure, Amazon Lambda to distributed machine learning like Federated Learning. This course will cover various topics of a distributed system, storage, and networking; including but not limited to cloud object stores, serverless frameworks, AI/deep learning, scheduling internet-scale applications, containers, resource management, key value stores, and so on. We will discuss research papers from top conferences to fuel brainstorming sessions to generate cool and novel ideas. Students will also get the opportunity to build real-world large-scale distributed systems to realize the new ideas discussed in class.
Have taken undergraduate-level Operating System or a similar course. This course assumes familiarity with systems, including how operating systems work and how networks work. If you don’t have this background, you should be in communication with me (the instructor) at the beginning of the semester.
This course is primarily intended for graduate students and motivated seniors who want to learn the latest research advances in distributed systems and cloud computing areas, and are interested in building distributed systems used/demanded by existing/emerging data-intensive applications.
Your grade will be calculated as follows:
The final grade is computed according to the following rules:
Each student will be granted 5 late days to use for the homework. After all free late days are used up, the penalty is 10% for each additional late day. Late days can not be used for the mid-way and final research presentation.
Cheating in this course will result in a grade of F for the course and the University policies will be followed.
If you need any accommodation, you are highly encouraged to contact both your instructor and Disability Resources Center (DRC).
The course schedule is tentative and subject to change.
The research project can be done in a group of 2 students. The project will be judged on the following criteria:
Recommended structure for the Proposal Report is:
You should present the current progress of your final project including design, related work review, any results if you have some (to show motivation or evaluation).
You should present the final project including design, related work, and final results to showcase your project.
The final deliverable of this course is a conference-quality paper. Focus on the following Questions 0 through 5 (an extended version of Question 0 through 3 in the Checkpoint Report requirement):
As well as pay attention to:
It is common that the implementation or experimental methodology gets adapted in the course of your investigation. And therefore, given that this is your final write-up, please make sure to refine/change/expand based on your mid-way presentation feedback to reflect your latest implementation & evaluation activities.