Special Topics on Networking and Distributed Systems

Location (CHANGED!): CIT 345
Time: J, Tuesdays/Thursdays 1:00-2:20
Instructor: Rodrigo Fonseca
Office: CIT 329
Office hours: By appointment (we'll do a poll for time slots)

This class is a graduate seminar structured to expose students to a selection of current research topics in networking, distributed, and operating systems. The main goal for this class is to prepare students to do research in these areas.

There are two major components to the course: (a) reading and discussion of research papers, and (b) a semester-long research project. At the end of the semester you should have a good idea of some of the current research challenges in these areas, be comfortable with reading the systems research literature critically, and be able to conduct, evaluate, and write about your own research project in systems.

There is a strong tendency of concentrating computation and data storage in 'the cloud', massive and distributed collections of computers in datacenters around the world. These are accessed by browsers and mobile devices, and amass data not only from these, but from a growing number of sensors and other devices connected to the Internet.

We are finalizing the list of papers we will read, but topics will include, to various extents, large-scale internet system architectures, p2p, consistency versus availability tradeoffs; datacenter system architectures such as GFS and Map Reduce; datacenter networking architectures; troubleshooting distributed systems; the browser and mobile clients as new execution platforms; and energy as a limiting resource.

See the syllabus and schedule for more details.

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