CS590N Tentative Syllabus

This syllabus is a goal. We will cover as much of this material as time permits. However, we may not be able to cover all these papers during the semester, and will adjust accordingly.

Slides are password protected. See the instructor for the password.

Overview

• Week 1 (Aug 25-29)
  • Introduction (slides)
  • Web Search for a Planet: The Google Cluster Architecture. Luiz Barroso, Jeffrey Dean, and Urs Hoelzle. (slides)
  • Virtual Machine Monitors: Current Technology and Future Trends. Mendel Rosenblum (VMWare) and Tal Garfinkel (Stanford University). IEEE Computer Society, 2005 (slides)
• For more details:
  • Wikipedia's Data Center Article
  • TIA-942 Data Center Standards Overview
  • Octant: A Framework for the Geolocation of Internet Hosts
  • iPlane: An Information Plane for Distributed Services

Web 2.0 technologies

• Week 2 (Sept 3-5, no class Sept 1 -- Labor Day)
  • Ajax: a new approach to web applications Jesse James Garrett, Adaptive Path. (slides)
  • AjaxScope: a platform for remotely monitoring the client-side behavior of web 2.0 applications. Emre Kiciman and Benjamin Livshits. SOSP'07 (slides)
• Week 3 (Sept 8-12)
  • Protection and Communication Abstractions for Web Browsers in MashupOS. Helen J. Wang, Xiaofeng Fan, Jon Howell, Colin Jackson. SOSP'07 (slides)
  • Secure Web Applications via Automatic Partitioning (Awarded a best paper award). Stephen Chong, Jed Liu, Andrew C. Myers, Xin Qi, Krishnaprasad Vikram, Lantian Zheng, and Xin Zheng (Cornell) SOSP'07 (slides)
• For more details:
  • Google Web Toolkit
  • Flapjax
  • (Additional reading) World Wide Web Without Walls Micah Brodsky, Maxwell Krohn, Robert Morris, Michael Walfish, and Alexander Yip (MIT). HOTNETS'07

Data Processing

• Week 4 (Sept 15-19)
  • MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. OSDI'04 (slides)
  • Pig Latin: A Not-So-Foreign Language for Data Processing. C. Olston, B. Reed, U. Srivastava, R. Kumar and A. Tomkins. SIGMOD'08 (slides)
• For more details:
  • Dryad: Distributed Data-Parallel Programs from Sequential Building Blocks. Michael Isard, Mihai Budiu, Yuan Yu, Andrew Birrell, Dennis Fetterly. EuroSys'07
  • MapReduce: A Major Step Backwards and MapReduce Continued. David J. DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker. Weblog, Jan. 2008.

Programming models for distributed systems

• Week 5 (Sept 22-26)
  • Events vs. Threads. (slides)
  • Combining Events and Threads for Scalable Network Services. Peng Li, Steve Zdancewic (U Penn). PLDI'07. Presenter: Philip Schatz
  • Programming Asynchronous Layers with CLARITY. Prakash Chandrasekaran (Chennai Mathematical Institute), Christopher L. Conway (NYU), Joseph M. Joy (MSR-I), Sriram K. Rajamani (MSR-I). ESEC/FSE'07
• Week 6 (Sept 29-Oct 3)
  • Mace: language support for building distributed systems. Charles Edwin Killian, James W. Anderson, Ryan Braud, Ranjit Jhala, Amin M. Vahdat. PLDI'07 (slides)
  • Programming in Mace (tutorial)
  • Programming in Mace (tutorial, cont.) Implementing Declarative Overlays. Boon Thau Loo, Tyson Condie, Joseph Hellerstein (U.C.Berkeley), Petros Maniatis,Timothy Roscoe (Intel Research), Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley). SOSP'05
• Week 7 (Oct 6-10)
  • The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems. Mike Burrows. OSDI'06
  • Sinfonia: A New Paradigm for Building Scalable Distributed Systems (Awarded a best paper award). Marcos K. Aguilera (HP Labs), Arif Merchant (HP Labs), Mehul Shah (HP Labs), Alistair Veitch (HP Labs), and Christos Karamanolis (VMWare). SOSP'07
  • Life, Death, and the Critical Transition: Finding Liveness Bugs in Systems Code. Charles Edwin Killian, James W. Anderson, Ranjit Jhala, Amin M. Vahdat. NSDI'07. Presenter: Salman Pervez
• For more details:
  • SEDA: an architecture for well-conditioned, scalable internet services. Matt Welsh, David Culler, and Eric Brewer. SOSP'01
  • Capriccio: Scalable Threads for Internet Services. Rob von Behren, Jeremy Condit, Feng Zhou, George C. Necula, and Eric Brewer. SOSP'03
  • X-Trace: A Pervasive Network Tracing Framework. Rodrigo Fonseca, George Porter, Randy H. Katz, Scott Shenker, and Ion Stoica, University of California, Berkeley. NSDI'07
  • Implementing Declarative Overlays. Boon Thau Loo, Tyson Condie, Joseph Hellerstein (U.C.Berkeley), Petros Maniatis,Timothy Roscoe (Intel Research), Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley). SOSP'05

Wide-area networking

• Week 8 (Oct 15-17, no class Oct 13 -- October break)
  • An Analysis of Internet Content Delivery Systems. Stefan Saroiu, Krishna P. Gummadi, Richard J. Dunn, Steven D. Gribble, and Henry M. Levy, University of Washington OSDI'02. Presenter: Ankur Khetrapal
• Week 9 (Oct 20-24)
  • Improving MapReduce Performance in Heterogeneous Environments. Matei Zaharia, Andy Konwinski, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, and Ion Stoica (Berkeley). OSDI'08 Presenter: Abhinav Pathak
  • Democratizing Content Publication with Coral. Michael Freedman, Eric Freudenthal, and David Mazieres, New York University NSDI'04
  • UsenetDHT: A Low-Overhead Design for Usenet. Emil Sit, Robert Morris, and M. Frans Kaashoek, MIT CSAIL. NSDI'08 Presenter: David Zage
• Week 10 (Oct 27-31)
  • Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data. Fay Chang, Jeffrey Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Wilson C. Hsieh, Deborah A. Wallach, Mike Burrows, Tushar Chandra, Andrew Fikes, and Robert E. Gruber. OSDI'06 Presenter: Chao Xu
  • Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-Value Store. Guiseppe DeCandia, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Avinash Lakshman, Alex Pilchin, Swami Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall, and Werner Vogels (Amazon.com). SOSP'07 Presenter: Vinay Ganesh
• For more details:
  • Scale and Performance in the CoBlitz Large-File Distribution Service. KyoungSoo Park and Vivek S. Pai, Princeton University. NSDI'06

Storage

• Week 11 (Nov 3-7)
  • The Direct Access File System. Matt DeBergalis, Peter Corbett, Steve Kleiman, Arthur Lent, Dave Noveck, Tom Talpey, and Mark Wittle, Network Appliance, Inc. FAST'03 Presenter: John Valko
  • The Google File System. Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung. SOSP'03 Presenter: Karthik Kambatla
• Week 12 (Nov 10-14)
  • Data ONTAP GX: A Scalable Storage Cluster Michael Eisler, Peter Corbett, Michael Kazar, and Daniel S. Nydick, Network Appliance, Inc.; J. Christopher Wagner, IronPort Systems, Inc. FAST'07 Presenter: Sunghwan Yoo
  • Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You? Bianca Schroeder and Garth A. Gibson, Carnegie Mellon University. FAST'07 Presenter: Athul Acharya
• For more details:
  • Are Disks the Dominant Contributor for Storage Failures? A Comprehensive Study of Storage Subsystem Failure Characteristics. Weihang Jiang, Chongfeng Hu, and Yuanyuan Zhou, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Arkady Kanevsky, Network Appliance, Inc. FAST'08
  • Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, and Luiz Andre Barroso, Google Inc. FAST'07

Configuration/Virtual machines

• Week 13 (Nov 17-21)
  • ACMS: The Akamai Configuration Management System. Alex Sherman, Akamai Technologies and Columbia University; Philip A. Lisiecki and Andy Berkheimer, Akamai Technologies; Joel Wein, Akamai Technologies and Polytechnic University. NSDI'05 Presenter: Karthik Nagaraj
  • Black-box and Gray-box Strategies for Virtual Machine Migration Timothy Wood, Prashant Shenoy, and Arun Venkataramani, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Mazin Yousif, Intel, Portland. NSDI'07 Presenter: Anurag Singh
• Week 14 (Nov 24, then Thanksgiving Break)
  • DieCast: Testing Distributed Systems with an Accurate Scale Model. Diwaker Gupta, Kashi V. Vishwanath, and Amin Vahdat, University of California, San Diego. NSDI'08 Presenter: KC Sivaramakrishnan
• For more details:
  • GoVirtual.org VMWare established page for virtualization news
  • Xen and the art of virtualization. Barham, P., Dragovic, B., Fraser, K., Hand, S., Harris, T., Ho, A., Neugebauer, R., Pratt, I., and Warfield, A. SOSP'03
  • Live Migration of Virtual Machines. Christopher Clark, Keir Fraser, and Steven Hand, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory; Jacob Gorm Hansen and Eric Jul, University of Copenhagen; Christian Limpach, Ian Pratt, and Andrew Warfield, University of Cambridge NSDI'05

Energy management

• Week 15 (Dec 1-5)
  • Reducing Energy Consumption of Disk Storage Using Power-Aware Cache Management. Qingbo Zhu, Francis M. David, Christo F. Devaraj, Zhenmin Li, Yuanyuan Zhou and Pei Cao. HPCA'04
  • Making Scheduling "Cool": Temperature-Aware Workload Placement in Data Centers Justin Moore and Jeff Chase, Duke University; Parthasarathy Ranganathan and Ratnesh Sharma, Hewlett-Packard Labs USENIX'05 Presenter: Emil Stefanov
• Week 16 (Dec 8-12)
  • VirtualPower: Coordinated Power Management in Virtualized Enterprise Systems. Ripal Nathuji (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Karsten Schwan (Georgia Institute of Technology). SOSP'07 Presenter: Bill Pfeifer
  • Energy-Aware Server Provisioning and Load Dispatching for Connection-Intensive Internet Services. Gong Chen, University of California, Los Angeles; Wenbo He, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Jie Liu and Suman Nath, Microsoft Research; Leonidas Rigas, Microsoft; Lin Xiao and Feng Zhao, Microsoft Research. NSDI'08
• For more details:
  • Managing Energy and Server Resources in Hosting Centers. Jeff Chase, Darrell Anderson, Prachi Thakar, Amin Vahdat, and Ron Doyle. SOSP'01

Project presentations

• In place of an exam

Updated: August 24, 2008