CS 655
System and Network Architectures and Implementation
(Spring 2012)

M. Tamer Özsu
tamer.ozsu@uwaterloo.ca
DC 3350

Lecture times: Thursdays 4:00-6:50PM

Lecture location: DC 3313

Calendar Description

Distributed, multi-user applications are designed and implemented using many underlying technologies that must be coordinated to provide important features such as robustness, scalability, manageability, ubiquitous access, privacy, security, authentication, and role-based access control, to name only a few. The network supporting the application may be crucial to its successful implementation. The application logic itself is likely implemented in a number of languages and programming environments. Students will be provided with an advanced overview of current networking and distributed systems topics, and will apply it to case studies drawn form consumer internet applications, enterprise systems, and medical and healthcare systems.

Prerequisites

Students are expected to understand the fundamentals of programming languages, data structures, operating systems, and algorithms, each at least at the level of an introductory course.

References

There are no required textbooks for the course. There will be lecture notes that will be provided and we will be reading a number of papers. However, the lecture notes will be based on the following textbooks that you may find useful:

• Computer Networking, 5th edition, James F. Kurose and Keith W. Ross, Addison-Wesley, 2009.
• Distributed Systems, 2nd edition, Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Maarten van Steen, Prentice-Hall, 2007.

For access to papers, you can consult Michael Ley's online bibliography:

• DBLP Computer Science Bibliography

Workload and Evaluation (tentative and may change)

• Three critical reviews of research papers (45%)
  • First one due by 21 June (email me PDF file)
  • The second and third one are due by 28 July (again email me PDF files)
• Final exam (40%)
  • This will be scheduled separate from the usual finals week at a mutually agreeable time. I may even give a take-home final, but I have not decided yet.
• Class participation (15%)
  • I will lecture until 31 May (inclusive); after that half of each class will be lecture, the second half will be discussion. See below...

Please review the materials concerning academic integrity and academic honesty. You must complete and sign the Academic Integrity Acknowledgement Form, and hand it in at the beginning of third lecture.

Schedule (tentative and may change)

The first five classes will be straight lectures. Starting June 7, the first half of the class will be lecture on the indicated topic, and the second half will be devoted to a class discussion of papers related to the topic of the previous week's lecture.

*Note: This is a Friday, we need to move the lecture since I'll be out of town on the regular lecture day.

**Note: Since Dr. Khuzaima Daudjee, who will be giving the lecture, teaches another course 4:00-5:20, we will do the paper discussion in the first half and he will give the cloud computing lecture starting at 5:30.

Eventually, there will be clickable links from Lecture Notes that will allow you to download lecture slides; similarly links from Papers will take you to a list of appropriate papers for that topic that will be discussed in class and that can also be used for critiques.