Reading Groups

You have been assigned to a reading group for the semester:

Your reading group will meet weekly to discuss the weekly paper assignment, and to write reacation notes (Reacation Notes Guidlines) together that you will submit prior to the Monday class meeting where we discuss the paper(s). Note that this must be completed prior to the class meeting when we discuss the assigned paper(s).

Specifically, each week your group will:

  • Meet to discuss the weekly paper prior to the class meeting in which the paper will be discussed. Prior to meeting with your reading group, each group member should have critically read the paper(s) ( Tips for reading research papers), and taken some notes on their reading to prepare for the discussion.

  • After your group’s discussion of the paper(s), together you will work on a single Reaction Notes document by your reading group. One Reaction Notes document will be submitted per Reading Group. Group members should take turns with lead editing repsonsibility of the write-up. However, you are all responsible for its content and will all receive the same grade on it.

The purpose of your weekly reading group meetings and reaction notes writing is to help you prepare for in-class discussions of papers.

Requirements

READ THIS: Reading Group and Reacation Notes Guide. It contains detailed requirements for reading notes and reading groups, as well as tips for reading research papers, reading group meetings, and information about how to access your ReactionNotes repo from CS87 github org, and write-up and submit your group’s reaction notes.

Because your reading group will meet weekly, you should schedule a regular weekly meeting time for your group.

Finally, remember to bring a print-out or electronic version of your reaction notes and the paper(s) to class with you each week.

Viewing and Printing Papers

Papers that are available from ACM or IEEE digital library must be accessed from within swarthmore.edu to download a .pdf version of the paper that you can then print and read.

You can view and print pdf files using acroread or evince:

$ acroread file.pdf
$ evince file.pdf

You can view most postscript files (and gziped postscript files) using gv on our system:

$ gv file.ps.gz

gv cannot handle some version of postscript, in this case you should save a copy of the paper.ps.gz file, gunzip it, and try viewing in gs or convert it to pdf and view it using evince or acroread:

$ gunzip file.ps.gz
$ gs file.ps
$ ps2pdf file.ps      # creates file.pdf you can open with acroread

You can print a postscript file using lpr (but lpr is not pdf files!):

$ lpr file.ps
$ mpage -2 -M-10 -dp file.ps | lpr     # using mpage to create a 2-up version

You can print a pdf file from evince or acroread. You could also convert a pdf file to postcript using pdf2ps and then print the postscript conversion using lpr.

$ pdf2ps file.pdf  # creates file.ps you can print with lpr

Fall 2023 Papers

In addition to the assigned weekly readings, there are some related paper references here: Additional Cluster and Distributed Computing Papers









Paper 1: Due Monday Sept 11




This week is not a paper discussion, but a group presentation.
Each Reading Group will prepare a 15 minute presentation on a
specific parallel architecture and system that they will deliver
in class week 2.






The assignment: Parallel System Presentation and Report


















Paper  2: Due Sept. 18




NOTE: your reactionsnotes.tex and QUESTIONNAIRE.adoc must be
pushed to your repo by 9am






Reaction Notes paper on System Design:











Quick Read paper* on Network Communication:











Reaction Notes Question




What is meant by an endpoint?  Is there
any benefit to putting a function not at an endpoint (in a lower-level
or intermediate point)?  If yes, explain what is gained by doing so and if
any guarantee about the functionality can be made by doing so.  If no,
explain why not.  You may want to use an example to explain your answer.






*About Quick Read Papers:
With the main Reaction Notes paper(s) each week, there may also be
a Quick Read paper assignment.  Quick Read papers are ones
you should read through less thoroughly than the
main paper(s)--read through one time to try to get a big picture ideas of
the paper.
They are related to the main Reaction Notes paper(s).  They may present
comparision systems, provide a example, or help explain some parts of the
main Reaction Notes paper.  We discus them in class, but not at the
same depth level as the main paper(s).






We will discuss this paper briefly and at a high-level.  As you skim
through it try to understand the main goals and a rough idea of
how those lead to separate protocol layers TCP and IP (and UDP-IP).
You do NOT need to know, nor understand, the details of IP, UDP, TCP.
Nor do you need to know any of the other protocols presented
(just FYI: ISO-OSI is the original layered protocol model for
communication networks, and X.25 is an older protocol for
packet switched networks (pre-dating IP)).




















Paper  3: Due Sept. 25




Reaction Notes papers on Parallel Languages











Don’t get too bogged down in the code examples in these, focus on
the language, goals, and types of parallelization and target systems.  It
is probably easier to understand the OpenMP paper if you read the MPI paper
first.










    

  1. 

    MPI: A message passing standard for MPP and workstations,
Dongarra, Otto, Snir, and Walker, CACM, 39(7), 1996, pp.  84-90
    

    2. 

  2. 

    OpenMP: OpenMP: An Industry-Standard API for Shared-Memory
Programming, by Leonardo Dagum and Ramesh Menon, in IEEE Computational
Science and Engineering, January 1998
    

    

    Note: in the Fortran code examples, lines that begin with 'c' are comments.
Chapt. 14.7 of Dive into Systems, and
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
OpenMP tutorial
have OpenMP examples in C (and C++).
    

    

    3. 









Reaction Notes Question




What are the target systems for MPI and OpenMP?  How well would each fit for
programming on a cluster of multicore nodes?  Explain the strengths and
weakness of MPI and OpenMP for a cluster of multicore nodes.




















Paper  4: Due Oct. 2




Reaction Notes papers Heterogenous Computing











Reaction Notes Question




For the Summary part of your Reaction Notes: breifly describe the
purpose/goals of CUDA and OpenCL (the big what and why of each).






Reaction Notes Question: Compare the the level of programming abstraction
presented by CUDA to MPI and OpenMP.  What is exposed to the
programmer and what is abstracted away in CUDA?
Which of these three languages to you think are the easiest to program in
and which the most difficult?  Why?




















Paper  5: Due. Oct 9




Reaction Notes papers Map Reduce











Reaction Notes Question




Discuss the scalability of the Map Reduce Implementation.  How well is it
designed to scale to large-sized systems and large-sized applications?
Explain/support your answer.




















Paper  6: Due. Oct 23




Because this is due right after fall break, there are
no reaction notes this week, and no requirements to meet with your reading
group.  Instead, read the first paper in such a way that you are prepared
to discuss the main ideas and its message (a bit less in depth than a
Reaction Notes paper, but more in depth than a Quick Read paper).
Read through the Skim paper for the big ideas of what the system is and
how it is designed/implemented (a bit less in depth than a Quick Read paper).






Read Through paper The future of HPC











Skim paper Peer to Peer























Paper  7: Due. Oct 30




Reaction Notes papers GFS











Quick Read paper GFS today




Just skim this for an update about GFS: update on GFS








Reaction Notes Question




In what ways did the intended use of the file system lead to its design?
Pick one of these ways to discuss in more details (include explaination of
why the resulting design choice fits its intended use, and critique the
design choice in terms of how well it meets its goal (and explain why)).




















Paper  8: Due. Nov 6




Prior to reading the Chord paper, very briefly skim over some information
about Peer-to-Peer systems from
Wikipedia P2P.
In particular, look at the difference between structured and unstructured
P2P network architectures.






Reaction Notes papers Peer-to-Peer Systems




    

  • 

    "Chord:
A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Protocol for Internet Applications by Ion
Stoica, Robert Morris, David Liben-Nowell, David R. Karger, M.  Frans
Kaashoek, Frank Dabek, Hari Balakrishnan, IEEE/ACM Transactions on
Networking, Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2003
    

    

    focus on sections I-IV, and don’t worry to much about the theorms and proofs. Just skim other sections.
    

    

    • 









Reaction Notes Question




No reaction notes this week due to project proposal






Here is the one I would have given you, and something to think
about this as you read the paper for understanding:
Explain in your own words how the Chord lookup protocol works; do not repeat
all the details, but describe the big idea of how it works and why it is
desgined that way.




















Paper  9: Due. Nov. 20




Reaction Notes papers Failure and Consensus




    

  • 

    The
Byzantine Generals Problem by Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak,
and Marshall Pease, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and
Systems, Vol 4, No. 3, July 1982.
    

    

    Just focus on sections 1-3, skim 4 and 6, and you can skip 5.
    

    

    • 









Quick Read paper Failure











Reaction Notes Question




No reaction notes this week, but your reading group should meet and together
you should step through the example of applying the Byzantine Generals
algorithm.  Don’t get too bogged down by the proofs.  Instead, make sure
you understand the algorithm, can step through examples applying it, and have
some intuition about the main proof results (ex, why is 3m+1 needed with m
traitors?).  Also, be prepared to discuss the big ideas from the quick read
paper/presentation.




















Paper  10: Due. Nov 27




Skim paper Cloud Computing Stack Definitions











Reaction Notes papers Cloud and Green Computing
















Even though there are three papers, all are short (1 page, 3 pages, 5.5 pages)












Reaction Notes Question




No reaction notes this week due to Thanksgiving break.  However,
you should read these papers in the same way as other reaction notes papers,
and be ready to discuss them in class.




















Paper  11: Due. Dec. 4




Reaction Notes papers  Cloud and Edge Computing











Quick Read paper Containers




    

  • 

    Borg, Omega, and Kubernetes,
Burns, Grant, Oppenheimer, Brewer, Wilkes, Communications of the ACM,
Vol. 59, No. 5, May, 2016.
    

    

    Read this to get and understanding of the big ideas about containers,
what they are and what they provide (what, why), and also some of the
solutions that Kubernetes implements that solve problems with the
Borg (and Omega) approaches.
    

    

    • 









Reaction Notes Question on Emergence of Edge Computing




Pick one of the four ways that proximity helps (listed on page 32), and
expain in your own words what the issue/problem is related to proximity,
and how edge computing helps to solve it.  I encourage you to think of
your own examples to use to help explain your answer.




















Paper  12: just for fun some security readings




Because we have project presentations next week, there is no
paper 12 assignment.  However, since we did not get much chance to
read and discuss security issues this semester, here are a couple
papers I may have assigned for paper 12.  The first is a classic
paper about security issues in distributed systems.  The second is a
interesting story about the first computer worm, how it worked, what
happened, and the aftermath.  A worm is malware that can independently
propogate, attack and infect a system connected to a NW (vs. a
computer virus that requires a user to explicitly catch by running
a binary, clicking on an email attachment, etc.).






Optional (for fun) papers  some readings on computer security