CSE 452/M552: Distributed Systems, Spring 2017

• The course project to be done in teams of 2 (451) or individually (M552). The project is split into eight separate assignments, with one due roughly every week.
• Readings in distributed systems (approximately 14 papers).
• Blog entries answering questions about reading (5).
• Problem sets (5): to be done individually.

There is no textbook for this course. Instead, we will assign approximately 14 research papers 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.

On days with an assigned paper or short reading, 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 with a paper reading. (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 will use the 5 best grades over the quarter, so you don't need to write more than 5 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 eight separately graded assignments. You may skip any assignment at a cost of a 0.3 deduction for the final grade. That is, a B is to complete the assignments up through Lab 3.

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; we are likely to ask you 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 several short problem sets. They should be done individually. Our intent is to make the problem sets relatively easy (no more than an hour of work) for students who have been paying attention.

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.

We will also automatically grant each group eight 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, June 7 at 9:00pm. In other words, slip days are not available for the last assignment.