CSE 452/M552: Distributed Systems, Winter 2015

• Course project to be done in teams of 2 (451) or individually (M552). The project is split into seven separate assignments, with one due roughly every week and a half.
• Readings in distributed systems (15 papers, 5 web notes).
• Blog entries answering questions about reading (10).
• Problem sets (2-3): to be done individually.

There is no textbook for this course. Instead, we will assign approximately 15 research papers (and some additional short reading) tied to specific lectures; these readings are to be done before class, as we will take the papers as a starting point, not the end point of the class discussion.

Students in both 452 and M552 are required to post a short, unique comment, observation, or question to the discussion board by 10:00am on the day of each class. (Because each post needs to be unique, you are encouraged to post earlier than the deadline.) For each assigned reading, we will post one or two discussion questions to the discussion board, linked off the course web page. You may reply to this question, or pose one of your own; e.g., if you found something in the reading that was confusing. Valid posts can also take a position on a design choice in the paper, discuss the applicability of the paper to an important problem, answer another student's question, etc. Everyone should read the posted comments before class, so please keep your posts short -- a couple sentences is fine.

We grade blog posts on a two point scale: solid, pro forma. If you say something particularly interesting, we'll give you extra credit (e.g., we grade on a three point scale). We use the 8 best grades over the quarter, so you don't need to write more than 8 posts.

• Problem sets: 20%
• Blog posts: 10%
• Project: 70%

The course is not curved. There is no midterm or final exam. For the project, there are seven separately graded assignments; we will drop the lowest grade except for 3a (Paxos). That is, you must implement Paxos, but you can choose one other assignment to skip. You may skip other assignments at a cost of a 0.3 deduction for the final grade. That is, a B+ is to complete all the assignments up through 3a.

We have slip days that you can use at your discretion, but if you find yourself falling behind on an assignment, just let us know. We can be flexible about turn-in dates, but if you are more than a few days late on an assignment, you are likely not to get the next one done on time either. At that point, please talk to us to decide whether it is better to skip the next one or to keep doing the assignments in order, at a one week lag to the rest of the class.

There is no midterm or final exam for this course.

We plan to hand out two to three short problem sets over the quarter. The problem sets are to be done individually. Collectively, they can serve as an untimed, open note take home final; our intent is that a student who is up to date with the reading should be able to complete each problem set in at most a few hours.

The core of the course is to build a highly available, scalable, fault tolerant NoSQL key-value store in the Go programming language. Go is particularly convenient for writing this type of code, and NoSQL stores are widely used in practice.

The labs were initially designed for the MIT graduate distributed systems course, but we have made some modifications (mostly to make it easier to navigate the specifications). Each lab has an extensive test suite that you can use to validate your implementation. At MIT, the labs are done individually over the first 9 weeks of the semester.

As the last week of classes is always rushed, we have set aside that week as a hack week for working on the project and finishing up your other classes. There will be no lectures during hack week. Most schools other than UW have a gap between when classes end and when finals begin, to give students a chance to wrap up their projects.

We will also automatically grant each group seven slip days for the project assignments, for you to use at your discretion. These are calendar days -- weekends and holidays count. There are no slip days for problem sets. Regardless of your remaining slip days, all assignments must be turned in by Wednesday, March 18 at 4:30pm. In other words, slip days are not available for the last assignment.