CS97 Senior Conference on Distributed Computing, Spring 2000

1:15-4:00 M, Sproul 300
Professor: Tia Newhall

email:

Office: 36 Sproul (3rd floor)
Phone: 690-5637
Office hours: Wednesdays 2:00-4:00, Thursdays 2:45-4:30

Announcements

4/24/00:

Demo Signup: here.

4/3/00:

Details about the final components of your course project are available here: Final Project.
Carefully read over the requirements and guidelines for meeting (1) the Oral Project Report, (2) the Written Project Report, and (3) the Project Demo components of your final project.
Note the schedule for in-class project reports the weeks of April 17th and April 24th. I randomly selected the ordering of presenters each week. If you don't like your time slot then ask another group to switch with you and let me know the resulting change to the schedule. Because we currently have 4 groups presenting on April 24th, you should plan on class running a bit long that day.
Note the change in the paper presentation and reading schedule for next week (4/10).

3/12/00:

Mid-semester project report is due March 20th in-class. Each group is to prepare a one page written report and a 15-20 minute in-class presentation. Information about preparing your mid-semester project report is available here: Mid-Semester Project Report.

1/31/00:

Information about writing your project proposal is available here: Project Proposal.

1/24/00:

The small programming assignment is available here: Programming Assignment.
It is worth 2% of your final grade, and is due Friday February 25 by 5pm. However, I recommend that you work on it soon and turn it in early.
The pvm man pages are available off the PVM home page.

1/19/00:

In your reading groups this week just focus on the big issues from paper #2 and not all the details about different systems.
Guidelines and tips for preparing your paper presenation are avaible here: Paper Presentation Guidelines.
There are some examples of using LaTex for papers and slides in /home/newhall/public/latex_examples/
(I still recommend using Power Point for your slides).
To view postscript files on the Sun Lab machines you can use ghostview, or you can convert a postscript file to PDF format using the ps2pdf utility. PDF files can be viewed using acroread. To print a postscript file use lpr: "lpr file.ps".
If you are interested in installing a postscript viewer on your PC running WindowsNT or 98, try GSview , running linux try GV. I have not tried installing either of these, so I don't know how easy it is to do nor do I know how well they work.

Course Description

This course is designed as a survey of issues related to distributed computing. We will focus on two main areas: system support for distributed computing and programming models for distributed computing. We will read both classic and current papers on the topics.

Text

There is no text for this course. Instead, a set of papers is available on-line: Reading List.

In addition, I have many text books on distributed systems, which you may borrow, and there is a list of additional papers related to the topics we will discuss that is available here: Additional References .

It is expected that you read the weeks papers prior to class and come prepared to discuss the paper(s) in class. For the first few weeks of class, I will present some overview material and we will discuss readings in class. For the remainder of the semester we will have at least one paper presentation by a student each week, and possibly discuss another paper as a group.

Reading Groups

You will form a group with 2 or 3 other students. The purpose of this group is two fold: first, you will meet to discuss the ideas in the week's reading prior to class; and second, your group will make up your practice talk audience for your paper presentation. Prior to each class meeting, your reading group should meet for an hour or so to discuss the main ideas in each paper, and to help each other answer questions about ideas and details in the paper. Prior to your class presentation, you should give a practice talk to your group. As a practice talk audience member, your job is to help your group member polish his/her talk.

Grading

73% course project
(includes project proposal, mid-term progress report, final written project report and demo, and in-class final oral presentation, each of which will count as a portion of the 73% of your project grade) more information.
2% small programming assignment
10% discussion presentation
15% class participation

Paper Presentation

Each student will present a paper (or several related papers) to the class. Presentations will be approximately 1 hour long including questions and comments from the audience. Your presentation will be an organized talk using slides (I suggest using PowerPoint). Each presenter must meet with me at least twice prior to his/her talk: first, meet with me at least by the Tuesday before your talk with an outline of your talk, then meet with me the Thursday or Friday before your talk with a draft of your talk slides in hand. Look over my and other's oral presentation advice to get a better idea of how to organize your talk.

Class Participation

This course is designed as a paper reading and discussion course. I expect that you will read the week's paper(s) prior to class and come prepared to discuss the paper in class. During paper presentations by other students, you should come prepared with questions and comments you have about the paper and ask the speaker questions about the paper he/she is presenting.

Programming Assignment

One or two small programming assignments will be given early in the semester. They are designed to give you some practice writing and running distributed programs using one or more of the programming paradigms that we will discuss in class.

Project

The main part of your grade will be based on a semester long project. I strongly encourage you to work in groups of 2 or 3 students. More details: Final Project.

In the second or third week of class I will hand out a list of some project ideas. Also, you are welcome to come up with your own project idea. Your project should have something to do with distributed computing, and there should be a general question that you are trying to answer through this project. For example, if you are interested in distributed algorithms for solving the TSP problem, then one question you may try to answer is how well do the algorithms scale with respect to problem size and degree of parallelism (compare performance measures as the problem size increases and as the number of machines increases, and perform tests to explain your results).

Schedule

Reading List

DATE	TOPICS (*): paper presentation	PRESENTED PAPER(S)	PRESENTER	DISCUSION PAPER(S)	FOOD PROVIDER
week 1 (1/17)	Introduction	None	Tia	None	None
week 2 (1/24)	Distributed Systems Overview	None	None	[1] and [2]	Tia
week 3 (1/31)	Message Passing Libraries (*) Communication Protocols	[5] and [6]	Charlie	[4]	JoDe & Laura
week 4 (2/7)	Event Ordering (*) Distributed Communication	[7] and [8]	Brandon	[9]	Jon & Seth
week 5 (2/14)	Naming Issues (*) Fault Tolerance	[10] and [11]	JoDe	[12]	Dila
Friday (2/18)	Project Proposals Due by 5pm	***	***	***	***
week 6 (2/21)	Clusters () RPC ()	[13] and [14] [15] and [16]	Chuck Chaos	None	Brandon
Friday (2/25)	Programming Assignment due by 5pm	***	***	***	***
week 7 (2/28)	Distributed File Systems More Distr. File Systems (*)	[19] and [20]	Seth	[17] and [18]	Lorrin
3/1	SPRING BREAK	***	***	***	***
week 8 (3/13)	Distributed Shared Memory(*) Distributed Data/Objects	[21] and [22]	Paul	[23]	Charlie
week 9 (3/20)	Mid-semester Project Reports	***	Oral Presentation by each group	***	***
week 10 (3/27)	Security: Encryption () Security: Authentication ()	[25] [26]	Laura Dila	[24]	Chuck & Josh
week 11 (4/3)	Meta-computing () Meta-comp. security()	[27] and [28]	Josh	***	Chaos
week 12 (4/10)	Web Caching (*) Legion	[31] and [32] [29] and [30]	Lorrin Jon	***	Paul
week 13 (4/17)	Final Project Presentations	***	(1) Paul (2) Chaos, Josh	***	JoDe and Laura
week 14 (4/24)	Final Project Presentations	***	(1) JoDe, Laura, Dila (2) Brandon (3) Lorrin, Chuck (4) Charlie, Seth, Jon	***	Tia
week 15 (5/5)	Final Project Reports Due by 5pm Friday May 5th	***	***	***	***

Reading Groups

JoDe Hendrick, Laura Brown, Paul Dickson, Brandon Rutter
Dila Cil, Charlie Ellis, Lorrin Nelson, Jon Martinez
Josh Lewis, Chuck Groom, Chaos Golubitsky, Seth Olshfski

Reading, Writing, Oral Presentation Advice

Guidlines & tips for preparing your paper presentation
How to read a research paper

An Evaluation of the Ninth SOSP Submissions or How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper by Roy Levin and David D. Redell
Jim Marshall's project report advice
Jim Marshall's oral presentation advice
Mark Hill's oral presentation advice
Ian Parberry's "How to Present a Paper in Theoretical Computer Science"
"You and Your Research", Hamming

test.c
test

CS97 Senior Conference on Distributed Computing, Spring 2000

1:15-4:00 M, Sproul 300 Professor: Tia Newhall

Announcements

Course Description

Text

Reading Groups

Grading

Paper Presentation

Class Participation

Programming Assignment

Project

Schedule

Reading List

Reading Groups

Reading, Writing, Oral Presentation Advice

1:15-4:00 M, Sproul 300
Professor: Tia Newhall