Coordinates

  Instructor: Azer Bestavros (with help from Mark Crovella and John Byers)
    Meetings: Wed 1:00pm-03:00pm (Paper Presentations/Discussions)
              Fri 1:00pm-03:00pm (Joint meeting with Commonwealth Group)
       Place: MCS 135
Office Hours: Tuesday 11:00am-12:30pm (or by Appointments)
         URL: http://www.cs.bu.edu/~best/crs/cs591/S99
    Schedule: http://www.cs.bu.edu/~best/crs/cs591/S99/Schedule.html

Overview

• Architecture and Design Issues for Clustered Servers
• Networking and OS Support for High Performance Servers
• Performance Evaluation and Characterization
• Caching, Prefetching and Replication
• Network and Server QoS Management
• Transport Protocols to Support "mass" Communication

This class should serve as ``testing grounds'' for those interested in joining the Commonwealth Research Project. The class will have two regular weekly meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays as described below.

• The Wednesday meetings will be dedicated to reading and discussing papers that describe recent advances related to large-scale networked systems (a.k.a. the Web). A preliminary reading list is being compiled and you can take a sneak preview of it at http://www.cs.bu.edu/~best/crs/cs591/S99/readings.
• The Friday meetings will be dedicated to presentations/progress reports related to the Commonwealth Project as well as projects undertaken as part of CS591. I am hoping that this will give an opportunity for those taking the course to be "recruited" into Commonwealth-related projects. Also, this should give Commonwealth group members who are not taking the course for credit an opportunity to benefit from discussions/projects that may be triggered by cs591 readings.

Requirements

• Class participation is vital for a full understanding and appreciation of the material covered. This must be complemented with a consistent and thorough reading of the assigned papers. Class participation will constitute 10% of the final class grade.
• Make at least one class presentation and lead the discussion of a set of papers from the course reading list. Paper presentations will constitute 15% of the final class grade.
• Contribute to the writeup of on-line class notes for a class presentation by another student. This writeup will constitute 15% of the final class grade.
• By 3/3/1999, submit a 2-page proposal for a project related to the subject matter of the course. Proposals for class projects will be presented/discussed on 3/5/1999. Students already working on Masters or PhD projects on the subject matter need not submit new projects. Students are encouraged to speak with faculty or other more "senior" students early during the semester to identify suitable projects.
• Complete (or show significant progress towards completion of) the proposed class project by 4/21/1999. Final project presentations will be scheduled during the last 2 weeks of the semester. The class project will constitute 40% of the final class grade.
• There will be a final exam on the reading materials assigned and discussed in the class. The exam will be quite easy for students who kept up with assigned readings and with paper presentations and discussions. The final exam will constitute 20% of the final class grade.

Prerequisites

• Prospective students should be familiar with basic concepts of system design (e.g. resource management, performance evaluation, and issues of concurrency and synchronization) as covered in CS-350 or CS-552 (or equivalent).
• Prospective students should be familiar with basic networking protocols (e.g. TCP/IP protocols and Socket API) as covered in CS-555 (or equivalent).
• Here is a "Prerequisite Project" that should be a good indicator (or should I say a "litmus test") to whether or not you are ready to enroll in cs591.
  Construct a simple web server. Although web servers typically use port 80, you should use a port number > 1024 since those ports are available without root priviledges. Your server should listen on this port for "HTTP GET" requests and satisfy them when they arrive. It will not be necessary to satisfy multiple overlapping requests, so your server will be a single process and need not create any new processes. (So you needn't test your server with more than one request at a time). Your server will need to correctly handle html text, postscript, gif images, and jpg images; you should test your server with all four of these data types. Testing should be possible using an unmodified browser, (e.g., netscape navigator or internet explorer). You may want to check the HTTP 1.1 spec, RFC 2068 (a typical RFC opaque document that you will need practice digesting).

Created on: 1998.11.05
Updated on: 1998.11.15
Maintainer: Azer Bestavros