Administrative Information

Professor

T.A.

Course Description

Distributed systems consists of a collection of independent computers that appears to its users as a single coherent system. While their early development followed the emergence of high-speed local area computer networks at the beginning of 1970s, the recent availability of powerful and cheap microprocessors and pervasive connectivity has brought the topic to everyone's attention.
In this course we will discuss some of the basic principles behind distributed systems and review some of the main paradigms used to organized them.

As it will be expected from our department, this is a learn-by-doing kind of course. A major component of this class will be a large project, done as a team, that will address some interesting distributed systems issues.

Location and Time

Tuesdays and Thursdays - 2:00-3:20.
Lectures will be held in 1890 Maple, Room 342.

In compliance with Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, Northwestern University is committed to providing equal access to all programming. Students with disabilities seeking accommodations are encouraged to contact the office of Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) at +1 847 467-5530 or ssd@northwestern.edu. SSD is located in the basement of Scott Hall. Additionally, I am available to discuss disability-related needs during office hours or by appointment.

Course Prerequisites

• CS-343 Operating Systems or equivalent undergraduate OS course.
• CS-340 Introduction to Networking or equivalent undergraduate networking course.

Communication Channels

There will be a number of communication channels set up for this class:

• We will use the course web site ( http://www.aqualab.cs.northwestern.edu/classes/cs-495-w04) to post announcements related to the course. You should check this regularly for schedule changes, clarifications and corrections to assignments, and other course-related announcements.
• There is a newsgroup cs.495-ds, served off news.cs.northwestern.edu) intended to foster communication outside the classroom.
• Finally, there will be an email alias ( cs-495-ds@cs) for the staff that you should use for questions that would be inappropriate to post on the newsgroup/discussion-board (source code being a good example).

Announcements

• I have created a newsgroup (cs.495-ds) so that we can continue our discussions.
• I have placed selected reviews for each paper in the outline page.
• There is a pointer to the book site in "material".

Materials

Required

• Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms., Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Maarten van Steen, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2002. (``DSP2'' from now on.)
  (book web-site)
• Papers: A set of papers that will be made available.

Grading

• Project: 40%
• Class participation: 10%
• In class presentation: 15%
• Final, take-home, exam: 35%

Exams

There will be only one, take-home, final exam for this course.

Reading Papers

We will start each new section with an introduction of the basic problems/ideas/solutions, followed by students presentations of at least two papers on seminal work and current research in the topic. To ensure lively discussions, you will be responsible for reading and preparing a short (typed) summary of those papers before each class.

Paper Summaries

When reading papers it is normally useful to write down a summary of about a page. Your summary should include at least:

1. Paper title and its author(s).
2. Brief one-line summary.
3. A paragraph of the most important ideas: perhaps a combination of their motivations, observations, interesting parts of the design, or clever parts of their implementation.
4. A paragraph of the largest flaws; maybe an experiment was poorly designed or the main idea had a narrow scope or applicability. Being able to assess weaknesses as well as strengths is an important skill for this course and beyond.
5. A last paragraph where you state the relevance of the ideas today, potential future research suggested by the article, etc.

You may find the following brochure useful: Efficient reading of papers in Science and Technology by Michael J. Hanson, 1990, revised 2000 Dylan McNamee.

Class Structure

We have changed the organization of the class based on the experience collected during the first couple of weeks. In order to ensure enough time for our usual interesting discussions, from now on:

• We will hold the lecture on Tuesdays together with one paper presentation. Thursdays will be solely dedicated to paper presentations and discussion.
• We will impose a hard limit of 10' on the presentations themselves and allow 5' for clarification questions.
• We will have one moderator per topic (you will take turns to fill the position). The moderator will be responsible for:
  
  
  1. Sending the instructor a list of 3 questions/issues she/he feels will be interesting for our discussion.
  2. Getting the discussion started and guiding it.
  3. Keeping the discussion focused and ensuring everybody is given a chance to contribute.
  4. Summarizing the discussion during the last 3' for the rest of the group.

In-Class Presentations

Every presentation should include at least one slide for motivation, one for main ideas and contributions and one for open issues.

You must send me the slides for review at least 24hrs before your presentation.

I am putting together some notes on in-class presentations and useful web-pages on the general topic of technical presentations. This is still a work-in-progress!

Projects

Projects (done in groups of size 2+) are a critical component of this course. Your goal is to design, build and evaluate interesting systems that address issues, solve problems and exploit techniques from classroom discussions and readings.

Projects must be written up in a term paper and teams will present their results at the end of the course in a poster session or mini-conference.

This is a small list of potential ideas for projects (access restricted to inside Northwestern U.). Feel free to use one, propose something completelely different, or refine one of these into your own idea.

Project Deliverables and Deadlines

1. Proposal - January 29: 2-3 pages describing the purpose of the project, work to be done and potential load distribution, expected outcome/results, ....
2. Literature Survey - February 5: 2-3 pages (plus references) describing context and related work for the proposed project.
3. Design Document - February 18: 4-5 pages with a detailed description of the software design, load distribution among group members. Construct a detailed sketch of your evaluation plan - what hypothesis is to be tested, how will you control the test circumstances, what workloads will you apply, why will this test enable resolution of the hypothesis, and what and how will specific metrics be measured.
4. Final Report - March 18: The final report is a workshop-level paper describing your work, evaluation, related research, potential avenues to explore, etc. Code should be submitted electronically.

General Advice

• John Wilkes, CSP project startup documents, (HPL-CSP-90-42), 11 Oct. 1990 - A great guideline for project proposals.
• Roy Levin and David D. Redell, An evaluation of the ninth SOSP submissions -or- How (and how not) to write a good systems paper, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review 17(3):35-40 (Jul., 1983)
• George D. Gopen and Judith A. Swan,The Science of Scientific Writing,American Scientist (Nov-Dec 1990), 78: 550-558.