Inf-3203 Advanced Distributed Systems

Spring 2008

Last updated May 20.

PENSUM FOR INF3203 - Spring 2008

Exam schedule:

13:00  Tord-Arne Heimdal
13:45  Børge Jakobsen
14:30  Elizabeth Anne Jensen
15:15  Stian Stryni

NB! Eksamen finner sted på Ifis møterom A130 (Realfagsbygget, 1. etg. A-fløy).

Part 2: Worms and Botnets

Part 1:

Mandatory Assignment 1: Distributed Data Store

Find assignment as PDF here.

Important dates:

Wednesday, January 16:	Handout.
Friday, February 15:	Delivery of status report.
Friday, March 7:	Deadline for delivery.
Friday, March 14:	Everyone presents their solutions.

Exercises: Syllabus

• Each student must present a topic supported by one or several seminal papers as part of this course. The idea is to find a suitable problem that has to be presented in a scientific context (conjecture/problem to study, related work, design, implementation, experiments, evaluation). If you do not have any interesting problem yourself, we will hand out one. In preparation for this, please stop by my office (DJ-A251) or talk with TA Lars Brenna at the iAD lab. The idea is to match specific student interests with potential subjects/papers. See the attached list of example papers presented as part of this course last year.

Student paper presentation, session 1:

Hibernator, Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store, The Google File System

Student paper presentation, session 2:

Trickle: A Self-Regulating Algorithm for Code Propagation and Maintenance in Wireless Sensor Networks, The many faces of consensus in distributed systems, "The Byzantine Generals Problem.", Zyzzyva

Mandatory papers

How to give a good research talk, SL Peyton Jones, J Launchbury, J Hughes, SIGPLAN Notices 28(11), Nov 1993. Slides.

End-to-End Arguments in System Design, Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David D. Clark, Second International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (April 1981) pages 509-512. Published with minor changes in ACM Transactions in Computer Systems 2, 4, November 1984, pages 277-288. Scribe/FinalWord source. In 1997, Portable Document Format (PDF/Acrobat), PostScript, Rich Text Format (RTF), and ASCII text.

Hints for Computer System Design, Postscript, Acrobat, Web page, Word., Butler W. Lampson, ACM Operating Systems Review, Vol. 15, No. 5, 1983, pp. 33-48.

Example papers from last year

These are papers you can choose to present, but you are not limited to this list. See below for links to more papers. We prefer recent and/or seminal(older) papers presented at top system venues such as NSDI, OSDI, SOSP, USENIX.

The Google File System Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung, 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Lake George, NY, October,2003.

MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. Sixth Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI'04), San Francisco, CA, December, 2004.

Speculative Execution in a Distributed File System, Edmund B. Nightingale, Peter M. Chen, and Jason Flinn, 20th ACM symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Brighton, United Kingdom,October, 2005.

Implementing trustworthy services using replicated state machines Fred B. Schneider and Lidong Zhou, IEEE Security and Privacy, Volume 3, Number 5 (September/October 2005), 34--43. Earlier version available as Cornell Computer Science Department Technical Report TR 2004-1924, January 2004.

A Survey and Comparison of Peer-to-Peer Overlay Network Schemes Eng Keong Lua, Jon Crowcroft, Marcelo Pias, Ravi Sharma, Nanyang Technological University; Steven Lim, IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, Second Quarter 2005, Volume 7, No. 2.

Experience with an Object Reputation System for Peer-to-Peer Filesharing, Kevin Walsh and Emin Gün Sirer, Cornell University,

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, Google, Inc,

Experiences Building PlanetLab, Larry Peterson, Andy Bavier, Marc E. Fiuczynski, and Steve Muir, Proceedings of the 7th USENIX Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI '06), Seattle, WA, November 2006.

Virtualization Aware File Systems: Getting Beyond the Limitations of the Virtual Disks, Ben Pfaff, Tal Garfinkel, and Mendel Rosenblum, 3rd Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI '06), 2006, San Jose, CA, USA.

SplitStream: High-bandwidth multicast in a cooperative environment . Miguel Castro, Peter Druschel, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Animesh Nandi, Antony Rowstron and Atul Singh. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'03). Lake George, New York, October 2003. /p>

"The Byzantine Generals Problem."Leslie, L., S. Robert, et al. (1982). ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 4(3): 382-401.

"The many faces of consensus in distributed systems." Turek, J. and D. Shasha (1992). Computer 25(6): 8-17.

Useful resources

Finding papers/related work:

• Google
• ACM Digital Library
• CiteSeer
• OSDI '06
• All SOSP conferences
• NSDI

Similar courses at other universities:

Useful for finding assignment topics and good papers.

• CS344B@Stanford
• CS614@Cornell
• CS261@Harvard

Hints for presenting technical talks and writing papers.

Contact

• Email to all: inf-3203@list.cs.uit.no
• Email to the teachers: inf-3203-staff@list.cs.uit.no