18-845: Internet Services
Carnegie Mellon University, Spring 2018

Syllabus (pdf) | Critiques | Individual Project (IP) | Group Project (GP)

1. Instructors

Prof. David O'Hallaron, droh@cs.cmu.edu, GHC 7517
Office hours: Mon 4:10-5:10pm (or by appt.)

TA: Anise Ghorbani, aghorban@andrew.cmu.edu
Office hours: Wed 4-5pm, GHC 8102 (exceptions: 2/28:GHC 4405, 3/28:GHC 6121, 4/4:GHC 6121, 4/18:GHC 6121, 5/2:GHC 6121)

2. Organization

Class times: Mon and Wed, 2:30-3:50pm, DH 2105
Web page: www.ece.cmu.edu/~ece845
Class mailing list: 18-845@cs.cmu.edu
Blackboard: We will not be using Blackboard.
Piazza: We will not be using Piazza.
Course directory: /afs/ece/class/ece845

3. Reference material

There is no required textbook for 18-845. The following are standard references for Linux programming and network programming:
  • Michael Kerrisk, The Linux Programming Interface: A Linux and UNIX System Programming Handbook, No Starch Press, 2010.
  • W. Richard Stevens, Bill Fenner, Andrew M. Rudoff Unix Network Programming: The Sockets Networking API, Volume 1 (3rd Edition), Prentice Hall, 2003.
The CS:APP3e text, which is available in the campus bookstore and on permanent reserve in the Engineering library, covers system-level programming topics such as dynamic linking, process control, Unix I/O, the sockets interface, writing Web servers, and application level concurrency and synchronization:

4. Linux cluster resources
  • Andrew cluster: linux.andrew.cmu.edu
    • RHEL, 64-bit, login using your Andrew credentials
  • SCS Gates cluster: ghc{26..86}.ghc.andrew.cmu.edu
    • RHEL, 64-bit, login using your Andrew credentials
  • ECE cluster: ece{000-031}.ece.local.cmu.edu
    • SuSE, 64 bit, login using your ECE credentials
    • See here for details. Contact help@ece.cmu.edu for help with accounts.

5. Course schedule (work in progress)

Legend: IP: individual project, GP: group project

Class Date Day Topic Projects Discussion Leader
1 01/15 Mon No class - MLK day ---
2 01/17 Wed Intro and welcome Dave O'Hallaron
3 01/22 Mon System design principles IP out Dave O'Hallaron
4 01/24 Wed Server design: Basics Dave O'Hallaron
5 01/29 Mon Comparing server performance Anise Ghorbani
6 01/31 Wed Measuring server capacity Anise Ghorbani
7 02/05 Mon Motivating application: Google search Alex James
8 02/07 Wed Google file system (GFS) Zeyuan Tan
9 02/11 Mon Data processing: MapReduce Murtadha Aljubran
10 02/14 Wed Distributed stream processing: Samza/Kafka Gayatri Ravi Kamat
11 02/19 Mon Advanced processing: Cloud Dataflow Danqi Huang
12 02/21 Wed Advanced processing: TensorFlow IP due, 11:59pm NEW DUE DATE Souptik Sen
13 02/26 Mon Advanced processing: Apache Spark Apekshit Jotwani
14 02/28 Wed Replication: Paxos Alexander Yu
15 03/5 Mon Lock services: Chubby Nnamdi Adon
16 03/07 Wed Table-based storage: BigTable Cindy Zhang
17 03/12 Mon No class - Spring break ---
18 03/14 Wed No class - Spring break ---
19 03/19 Mon Distributed stores: Spanner GP abstracts due, 11:59pm Du Zhang
20 03/21 Wed Distributed stores: memcached Rishabh Arora
21 03/26 Mon Distributed stores: Tao Shuangning Liu
22 03/28 Wed Distributed stores: Consistency models Shaoxuan Yang and Hang Gong
23 03/28 Mon DRAM-based storage: RAMCloud Ian Van Stalen
24 04/04 Wed Datacenter management: Borg GP oral mid-term reports, in class Shrikant Giridhar
25 04/09 Mon Warehouse-scale computing Dave O'Hallaron
26 04/11 Wed Virtual machines: VMWare Zoe Lin
27 04/16 Mon Virtual machines: Xen Karan Dhabalia
28 04/18 Wed Containers Kiran Pandit
29 04/23 Mon No class - GP prep ---
30 04/25 Wed No class - GP prep GP reports due Thu 4/26, 11:59pm ---
31 04/30 Mon No class - GP prep GP reviews due Mon 4/30, 11:59pm ---
32 05/02 Wed GP poster session Location: DH 2105all
05/06 Sun GP final reports due Sun 5/6, 11:59pm ---

6. Detailed course schedule (work in progress)

Students who are not leading the discussion for a particular class should prepare a single 1-page critique. Unless explictly noted, the critique should cover all papers with a "*".

Bring a hardcopy (no email) of your critique with you to class and give it to the TA after class. TA will grade it and return it to you next class.

Class 1: No class - MLK day

Class 2: Welcome and intro

Class 3: System design principles

  • Note: Your critique should list three other examples (not discussed by the authors) of end-to-end arguments in system design.
  • *J. Saltzer, D. Reed, and D. Clark, End-to-End Arguments in System Design, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Vol 2, No 4, Nov, 1984. (pdf)

Class 4: Server design: Basics

  • Note: Please write a single critique covering both papers.
  • *V. Pai, P. Druschel, and W. Zwaenepoel, Flash: An efficient and portable Web server, Proceedings of the USENIX 1999 Annual Technical Conference, 1999. (pdf)
  • *Tim Brecht , David Pariag, and Louay Gammo, accept()able Strategies for Improving Web Server Performance, Proceedings of the USENIX 2004 Annual Technical Conference, June, 2004. (pdf)
  • D. Mosberger and T. Jin. httperf: A Tool for Measuring Web Server Performance. Performance Evaluation Review, Volume 26, Number 3, December 1998, 31-37. (Originally appeared in Proceedings of the 1998 Internet Server Performance Workshop, June, 1998.) ( html) )

Class 5: Comparing server performance

  • *David Pariag, Tim Brecht, Ashif Harji, Peter Buhr, and Amol Shukla, Comparing the Performance of Web Server Architectures, EuroSys 2007, Lisbon, Portugal, March, 2007. (pdf)
  • Ashif S. Harji, Peter A. Buhr, Tim Brecht, Comparing High-Performance Multi-core Web-Server Architectures, SYSTOR'12, ACM, 2012. (pdf)

Class 6: Measuring server capacity

  • *G. Banga and P. Druschel, Measuring the Capacity of a Web Server under Realistic Loads, World Wide Web Journal (Special issue on World Wide Web Characterization and Performance Evaluation), 2(1), May 1999. (pdf)

Class 7: Motivating Application: Google search

  • Note: Please write a single critique covering both papers.
  • *Sergey Brin and Larry Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Seventh International World Wide Web Conference / Computer Networks 30(1-7): 107-117. 1998. (pdf)
  • *Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd, The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web, 1998. (pdf)
  • Ian Rogers, The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works (html) May, 2002.

Class 8: Google file system (GFS)

  • Note: Please write a single critique covering both papers.
  • *Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung, The Google File System, in Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October, 2003. (pdf)
  • *Kirk McKusick and Sean Quinlan, GFS: Evolution on Fast-Forward, CACM, March, 2010. (html)

Class 9: Distributed data processing

  • *J. Dean, and S. Ghemawat, MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters, in Proceedings of Sixth Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, December, 2004. (pdf)

Class 10: Distributed stream processing

  • *Shadi A. Noghabi, Kartik Paramasivam, Yi Pan, Navina Ramesh, Jon Bringhurst, Indranil Gupta, and Roy H. Campbell, Samza: Stateful Scalable Stream Processing at LinkedIn, VLDB Endowment, Aug, 2017. (pdf)
  • Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede, Jun Rao, Kafka: a Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing, NetDB'11, 2011. (pdf)

Class 11: Advanced processing: Cloud Dataflow

  • *Tyler Akidau, Robert Bradshaw, Craig Chambers, Slava Chernyak, Rafael J. Fernández-Moctezuma, Reuven Lax, Sam McVeety, Daniel Mills, Frances Perry, Eric Schmidt, Sam Whittle, The Dataflow Model: A Practical Approach to Balancing Correctness, Latency, and Cost in Massive-Scale, Unbounded, Out-of-Order Data Processing, VLDB Endowment, 2015. (pdf)

Class 12: Advanced processing: TensorFlow

  • *Martin Abadi et al, TensorFlow: A System for Large Scale Machine Learning OSDI'16, 2016. (pdf)

Class 13: Advanced processing: Apache Spark

  • *Matei Zaharia, Mosharaf Chowdhury, Tathagata Das, Ankur Dave, Justin Ma, Murphy McCauley, Michael J. Franklin, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica Resilient Distributed Datasets: A Fault-Tolerant Abstraction for In-Memory Cluster Computing NSDI'12, 2012, Awarded best paper. (pdf)

Class 14: Replicaton: Paxos

  • *Tushar Chandra, Robert Griesemer, Joshua Redstone, Paxos Made Live - An Engineering Perspective, in ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC '07), Aug, 2007. (html)
  • Michael Swift, "Paxos, Agreement, Consensus", Lecture notes for CS 739, Spring 2012, Univ of Wisc, A clear and concise description of the algorithm and its behavior under various scenarios (pdf)
  • Angus MacDonald, Paxos by Example, Web post, 2012. (html). Helpful step-by-step example with multiple leaders.
  • Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout, In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm, USENIX, 2014. (pdf)
  • Leslie Lamport, Paxos Made Simple, ACM SIGACT News (Distributed Computing Column) 32, 4 (December 2001) 51-58. (pdf)

Class 15: Lock services: Chubby

  • *M. Burrows, The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems, in Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI'06), December, 2006. (pdf)

Class 16: Table-based storage: BigTable

  • *F. Chang, J. Dean, S. Ghemawat, W.C. Hsieh, D.A. Wallach, M. Burrows, T. Chandra, A. Fikes, and R. E. Gruber, Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data, in Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI'06), December, 2006. (pdf)

Class 17: No class - Spring break

Class 18: No class - Spring break

Class 19: Distributed Stores: Spanner

  • *J. Corbett, J. Dean, M. Epstein, A. Fikes, C. Frost, J. Furman, S. Ghemawat, A. Gubarev, C. Heiser, P. Hochschild, W. Hsieh, S. Kanthak, E. Kogan, H. Li, A. Lloyd, S. Melnik, D. Mwaura, D. Nagle, S. Quinlan, R. Rao, L. Rolig, Y. Saito, M. Szymaniak, C. Taylor, R. Wang, and D. Woodford, Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database, OSDI'12, 2012, Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award. (pdf)

Class 20: Distributed Stores: memcached

  • *R. Nishtala et al, Scaling Memcache at Facebook, NSDI '13. (pdf)

Class 21: Distributed Stores: Tao

  • *Nathan Bronson, Zach Amsden, George Cabrera, Prasad Chakka, Peter Dimov, Hui Ding, Jack Ferris, Anthony Giardullo, Sachin Kulkarni, Harry Li, Mark Marchukov, Dmitri Petrov, Lovro Puzar, Yee Jiun Song, and Venkat Venkataramani, TAO: Facebook's Distributed Data Store for the Social Graph, Usenix, 2013. (pdf)

Class 22: Distributed Stores: Consistency models

  • *Haonan Lu, Kaushik Veeraraghavan, Philippe Ajoux, Jim Hunt, Yee Jiun Song, Wendy Tobagus, Sanjeev Kumar, Wyatt Lloyd, Existential Consistency: Measuring and Understanding Consistency at Facebook, SOSP'15, 2015. (pdf)

Class 23: DRAM-based storage: RAMCloud

  • *Stephen M. Rumble, Ankita Kejriwal, and John Ousterhout, Log-structured Memory for DRAM-based Storage, FAST'14. Awarded best paper. (pdf)
  • John Ousterhout, Parag Agrawal, David Erickson, Christos Kozyrakis, Jacob Leverich, David Mazieres, Subhasish Mitra, Aravind Narayanan, Diego Ongaro, Guru Parulkar, Mendel Rosenblum, Stephen M. Rumble, Eric Stratmann, and Ryan Stutsman, The Case for RAMCloud, CACM, July, 2011. (pdf)

Class 24: Datacenter Management

  • *Abhishek Verma, Luis Pedrosa, Madhukar Korupolu, David Oppenheimer, Eric Tune, John Wilkes, Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg, EuroSys 2015, Bordeaux, France. (pdf)

Class 25: Warehouse-scale computing

  • Note: Please write a single critique covering the chapter you find most interesting (skip Chapter 6 on Modeling Costs and Chapter 7 on Failures and Repairs)
  • *Luiz Andre Barrosa, Jimmy Clidaras, and Urs Holzle, The Datacenter as a Computer, Second Edition, Morgan & Claypool, July 2013. (pdf)

Class 26: Virtual Machines: VMWare

  • *Ole Agesen, Alex Garthwaite, Jeffrey Sheldon, Pratap Subrahmanyam, The Evolution of an x86 Virtual Machine Monitor, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review archive Volume 44 Issue 4, December 2010. (pdf)

Class 27: Virtual machines: Xen

  • *P. Barham, B. Dragovic, K. Fraser, S. Hand, T. Harris, A. Ho, R. Neugebauer, I. Pratt, A. Warfiel, Xen and the Art of Virtualization, In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October, 2003. (pdf)

Class 28: Containers

  • *Wes Felter, Alexandre Ferreira, Ram Rajamony, Juan Rubio, Updated Performance Comparison of Virtual Machines and Linux Containers, IBM Research Report, RC25482 (AUS1407-001) July 21, 2014 (pdf)

Class 29: No class - GP prep

Class 30: No class - GP reports due

Class 31: No class - GP reviews due

Class 32: GP poster session