Carnegie Mellon University

Electrical and Computer Engineering

College of Engineering

Course Information

18-847B: Special Topics in Computer Systems: Modern Computer Systems

Units:

12

Description:

Computing in the cloud has emerged as a leading paradigm for cost-effective, scalable, well managed computing. Users pay for services provided in a broadly shared, power efficient datacenter, enabling dynamic computing needs to be met without paying for more than is needed. Actual machines may be virtualized into machine-like services, or more abstract programming platforms, or application-specific services, with the cloud computing infrastructure managing sharing, scheduling, reliability, availability, elasticity, privacy, provisioning and geographic replication.

This course will survey the aspects of cloud computing by reading about 30 papers and articles, executing cloud computing tasks on a state of the art cloud computing service, and implementing a change or feature in a state of the art cloud computing framework. There will be no final exam, but there will be one or two in class exams. Grades will be about 50% project work and about 50% examination results.

Example curriculum: - Motivations and risks - Use cases - Building blocks - Encapsulating computation - Scheduling - Storage - Programming models - Elastic scaling and load balancing - Multi-level scheduling - Key-value stores - Geo-replication - Data center networking - Economic incentives - Security and privacy - Mobile at the edge - Power management - Failure modes - Reliability and fault tolerance - Performance isolation and lowering latency - Monitoring and diagnosis

Prerequisites: 15-213, 18-213 or 15-513 from CMU, with a grade of at least a B

Last Modified: 2023-07-27 9:41AM

Semesters offered:

  • Fall 2023
  • Spring 2018
  • Spring 2017
  • Fall 2013