| Instructor: Bernard Wong |
| Email: bernard@uwaterloo.ca |
| Time: Every Friday at 3:00-5:50 Fall 2016 |
| Location: DC 2568 |
| URL : http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~bernard/courses/cs854-F16 |
Achieving consensus among a set of entities is a fundamental problem for many distributed systems. In these systems, different entities may propose conflicting values, but all of them must agree on a single one. This can be challenging due to unexpected system and network failures.
CS854 is a graduate course on both past and current research in consensus protocols. It is offered as a "paper-chase" course: we read and discuss important papers on different subtopics each week. Students must also complete a programming assignment (implementing Raft), and a final project that explores a new idea in one of the sub-topics covered in the course. The goal is that by the end of the course, the final project can serve as a starting point for a workshop paper submission.
The following is the tentative course grades breakdown.
Before each class, each student must submit a review for the non-optional papers to be discussed that day. A review should include a paragraph summarizing the core contributions of the paper, and a second paragraph that identifies weaknesses in the paper and areas in which the paper can be expanded upon.
Please inform me via email the circumstances for each late or missed submission.
Each student is expected to present the papers to be discussed in class for at least one class. The paper presentations should follow the same format as a conference talk. The presenter should be prepared with sufficient background knowledge of the related work in the area to answer broad questions and lead the class discussion.
Presenters: Please send me a copy of your slides at least two days before your presentation. I will provide feedback on the slides the next day. Do not just re-use slides provided by the paper authors. You may borrow, with attribution, figures and animations, but your slides should be created independently.
Last modified: Aug 15, 2016