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 CSEP 552: PMP Distributed Systems, Winter 2018

Overview

Instructor: Arvind Krishnamurthy
Office hours: by appointment.

TA: Kaiyuan Zhang
Office hours: by appointment
(send email to kaiyuanz at cs dot washington dot edu)

TA: Paul Yau
Office hours: by appointment
(send email to yaup at cs dot washington dot edu)

Lectures: Thursday, 6:30pm-9:20pm, in CSE 305.

Regular Office Hours: Thursdays, 5:00pm-6:20pm, in CSE 678.
Google Hangouts Link

CSEP552 is a graduate course on distributed systems. Distributed systems have become central to many aspects of how computers are used, from web applications to e-commerce to content distribution. This course will cover abstractions and implementation techniques for the construction of distributed systems, including client server computing, the web, cloud computing, peer-to-peer systems, and distributed storage systems. Topics will include remote procedure call, maintaining consistency of distributed state, fault tolerance, high availability, and other topics. As we believe the best way to learn the material is to build it, there will be a series of hands-on programming projects.

Prerequisities: the basic prerequisite is to have taken an undergraduate operating systems course (CSE 451 or equivalent) or an undergraduate networking course (CSE 461 or equivalent). If you haven't taken an undergrad OS or networks course, please come talk to Arvind. We will not be covering undergraduate material in this course.

Papers: you will be responsible for reading two to three papers before each class, and contributing your thoughts on the assigned papers to the class discussion board before the class that covers it.

Projects: every few weeks, I'll hand out a programming assignment related to the course material.

Grading: Course grades will be based primarily on the programming assignments (80%), along with participation in the discussion board (20%). The course is not curved.

Administrivia

Mailing list: When you register for the course, you'll automatically be added to the class mailing list (csep552a_wi18@uw.edu, csep552m_wi18@uw.edu). To manage your subscription, visit the mailing list web page for PMP students or the page for 5th year masters students. You will be subscribed using your u.washington.edu email address, but you can modify your subscription to use an email address of your choice. Note that you can only post to the mailing list from your subscribed email address.

Announcements

Canvas: Discussion Board, Dropbox

The discussion board and the assignment dropbox will be on the UW canvas site for the class.
https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1197687
For each lecture other than the first, we will post a small set of discussion questions based on the assigned papers. You're required to add a comment to the discussion of one of the questions by noon on the day of the class. (This is to give time for everyone to read the discussion entries before class.) Please keep your entries short: they can be anything that provides insight into the question being asked. We grade posts on a two point scale: solid, or pro forma. If you say something particularly insightful, we'll give you extra credit (i.e., 3 points). We'll drop the lowest score during the quarter.

Lecture and Paper schedule

Videos of lectures will be available at the following link.

Here is the schedule of papers for the quarter; this schedule might be tweaked as we progress. The discussion board entries for the assigned papers are due by noon on the day of the associated lecture.

Date

Reading

Slides / Notes

January 4 Introduction slides
January 11 Time, Clocks, and Global States slides
January 18 Distributed State slides
January 25 Consensus slides
February 1 Scalability slides
February 8 Transactions slides
February 15 Weak Consistency

slides
February 22 Distributed Systems Research at UW

no required readings or discussion board post this week

Guest lectures:

March 1 Big Data Analytics slides
March 8 Security slides

Assignments

The core of the course is to build a highly available, scalable, fault tolerant NoSQL key-value storage systems. Key-value stores are widely used in practice, and face many of the key challenges of distributed systems design. In the project, you'll use techniques drawn from the readings and lectures, e.g. state machine replication and Paxos consensus, to tackle these challenges.

Submission: Please submit your labs as a tarball using Canvas.

Late policy: We will allow a total of 5 slack days for all assignments; you can use and distribute them between the labs in whatever way is most convenient for you. Slack days cannot be used for Lab 4 for 2-person groups or Lab 3 for individual submissions (because of end-of-quarter deadlines). Once you have exhausted your allocation of 5 slack days, we will deduct 10% of the grade for an assignment for each day that it is submitted late.

Resources

You should be able to complete the labs on any machine that can run Java programs. In practice, you'll probably want to use your own personal machines; none of them require large or exceptionally powerful machines. You may find CSE's virtual machine images with the departmental linux installation useful. Alternatively, everybody registered for the course should already have had an instructional UNIX account created for them by the department support staff, and have been notified of it. Using this account, you can remotely log into (via ssh) the attu.cs.washington.edu compute cluster. You can find more information about instructional resources here.

Collaboration Policy

Collaboration is a good thing, but academic misconduct is a serious offense. CSE's Academic Misconduct Policy provides guidelines about the difference. For this course, our policy is simple:

Discussing ideas with others is allowed and encouraged! You should feel free to talk with other students about the programming assignments, and to ask for help from the instructor or TAs. You can also make use of Google or other resources. However, you must write all of the code you hand in yourself, except for code that we provide you as part of the assignment. You are not allowed to look at anyone else's solution, or at code from previous years. You may not use someone else's code or text in your solutions. Sharing ideas, explaining your code to someone else,and helping someone else debug when they've run into a wall are all OK.

If you do discuss a programming assignment with someone else or find useful sources of information (e.g., technical descriptions on the Web), please cite or otherwise attribute all of your sources.