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 CSEP590SG: PMP Distributed Systems, Winter 2004
 

Welcome to the CSEP590SG Home Page.

Instructor: Steve Gribble
TA: Andy Collins

[ Announcements | Administrivia | Class schedule ]

CSEP590SG is a graduate-level course on distributed systems. This course is designed to bring students up to the state of the art in distributed systems research and to provide the tools necessary to allow students to evaluate new technologies after the course ends. A major focus of the course will be class discussion based on readings from research papers. As partial preparation for each class, students will be asked to write a 1/2 page evaluation of two to three papers per week, due by 4pm on the day the paper is to be discussed in class. (This will give me a chance to read them before class.)

In addition, to make the discussion more concrete, there will be a series of small programming assignments and problem sets. Finally, there will be a take-home midterm exam.

Prerequisite courses: While there is no formal prerequisite course for this class, your are expected to have exposure to the ideas in an undergraduate operating systems course (see, for example, CSE451). We will not be covering undergraduate material in this course.


Announcements


Administrivia

Textbooks:

Grading:

Paper reviews:

Homeworks:


Class schedule

We will be covering approximately 20 research papers this quarter. For each paper we cover in class, you are responsible for submitting a summary before coming to class, by 4pm on the day we discuss the paper. Here are your instructions for reviewing papers.

Date Topic Misc.
January 13 Intro, name servers (papers) (reviews) homework one assigned
January 20 Time synchronization and snapshots (papers) homework one due
January 27 Process groups (papers)
February 3 Byzantine generals, Paxos (papers) homework 2 due
February 10 Fault tolerance, recovery (papers) homework 3 out
February 17 no papers due homework 3 due, midterm out
February 24 Encryption, authentication (papers) midterm due
March 2 Class cancelled, instructor sick. The Worms/DoS paper summaries are due this week; we'll discuss them in class next week. Next week, you have no paper summaries due. homework 4 out
March 9 Worms, DoS, and other security topics (papers) homework 4 due
March 16 Scalable servers (papers)

Computer Science & Engineering Department
University of Washington
PO Box 352350
Seattle, WA 98195-2350 USA