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Welcome to CS 739 - Distributed Systems

Spring 2011

Notes

• The second midterm will be available starting Friday, May 6th. You have 48 hours to complete it, and it must be completed by Thursday, May 12th at midnight.
  • Please send email to swift@cs.wisc.edu to request the paper; it may take up to 6 hours to get a response, so please send it early enough.

Overview

Welcome to distributed systems! This course will cover an exciting range of materials from the broad field of distributed systems and cloud computing, including communication, replication, consistency, scalability, security, storage, programming models, manageability and data centers. We will examine influential historical systems and important current efforts, extracting lessons both on how to build systems as well as how to evaluate them.

Readings

There is no textbook for this course. Instead, we will read the original research papers covering the major advancement in distributed system design. We will read several papers grouped around major topics, such as communication, consistency, scalability, etc. While most of the papers focus on seminal ideas, a few focus on evaluation and measurement or future directions in research.

We will read approximately 2-3 papers per week. You will have to write a one-page review for one paper a week and submit it to the review blog before class.

Project

The class entails 1-2 programming projects focusing on solving problems in distributed systems. You will do projects in small groups.

Exams

There may be a midterm and a final or second midterm..

Grading

The success of this class depends on your participation in class. Therefore, class participation counts for a large portion of your grade. You are expected to have done the readings and contribute your thoughts in class.

Late assignments will be docked 25% per day late.