CS756I: Topics in Distributed Systems

High-Performance Internet Systems and Applications

Contents

Guest Lectures:

Date      Guest             Affiliation    Subject

Feb. 17   Steve Radman      Sybase         World Cup '98 Web Site
Mar.  4   Gordon Cormack    UW             Search Engines and/or MultiText

• Project Proposal. Due *** Monday February 1 ***, 1999. I'd prefer a hardcopy if you can (you can put it under my door or put it in my mail box in the CS department). If not just send me an email copy.
  Proposal Guidelines   NOTE: HARD 1 PAGE LIMIT
• Related Talk of Possible Interest
  

  The infraNET Project Distinguished Speaker Seminar
  "Practical Solutions for Web Site Content Management and
  Personalization"
  David Boswell, President and CEO, LivePage Corporation
  2:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.; DC1302
  There is no charge for this event.
  Pre-registering to reserve your seat is recommended.
  Seats are reserved on a first-come, first-serve basis.
  Register via our web site at: 
  
  http://infranet.uwaterloo.ca/
  
  or call 519-888-4567 ext. 5611.
  

Recent research suggests that it is no longer the underlying computer systems or the networks that are roadblocks to high-performance Internet applications but the software. In this course we will examine existing Internet systems and applications and their performance and hopefully develop new techniques that will enable such systems to better exploit modern high-speed networks. In addition we will investigate techniques for improving performance and hiding latencies in systems with slow network connections.

Possible topics of discussion, readings, and study are: widely used and emerging Internet applications, web servers, web proxies, caching, high-speed networks, operating systems, disk architecture, file systems, and experimental design.

Grades will probably be computed using the tentative weighting scheme below:

     Class Participation    10%
     Reading Summaries      20%
     Project Proposal       10%
     Final Project          45%
     Project Presentation   15%

This is a graduate class. You are expected to be capable programmers and skilled testers and debuggers. Use good programming and writing practices when doing your project. These practices will be considered when assigning grades.

Useful References and Texts

NOTE: There is no text book required for this course. However, there may be text books that you will find useful or even necessary in order to complete your course projects.

Networking

• UNIX Network Progamming, Volume 1, 2nd Edition, W. Richard Stevens, Prentice Hall, 1998.
• UNIX Network Progamming, Volume 2, 2nd Edition, W. Richard Stevens, Prentice Hall, 1998.
• TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1: The Protocols, W. Richard Stevens, Addison Wesley, 1994.
• TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2: The Implementation, Gary R. Wright and W. Richard Stevens, Addison Wesley, 1995.
• TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 3: TCP for Transactions, HTTP, NNTP, and the UNIX Domain Protocols, W. Richard Stevens, Addison Wesley, 1995.
• ATM networks, O. Kyas, International Thomson Computer Press, 1995
• Gigabit Networking, C. Partidge, Addison-Wesley, 1994
• IPv6: The New Internet Protocol, Christian Huitema, Prentice Hall, 1997.
• Mobile IP: The Internet Unplugged, James D. Solomon, Prentice Hall, 1998.

Operating Systems

• The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System, M. McKusick, K. Bostic, M. Karels and J. Quarterman, Addison Wesley, 1996.
• UNIX Internals: The New Frontiers, Uresh Vahalia, Prentice Hall, 1996.
• Solaris 2.x: Internals and Architecture, J. Graham, McGraw-Hill, 1995.
• The Magic Garden Explained: The Internals of UNIX System V, Release 4, B. Goodheart and J. Cox, Prentice Hall, 1994.
• Operating Systems Concepts, 4th Edition, Silbershatz and Galvin, Addison-Wesley, 1994.
• Concurrent Systems: An Integrated Approach to Operating Systems, Database, and Distributed Systems, Jean Bacon, Addison Wesley, 1992.
• Modern Operating Systems, Tanenbaum, Prentice Hall, 1992

Performance

• The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis, Raj Jain, John Wiley and Sons, 1991

Java

• JavaSpace(TM) Technology: A Tutorial and Reference Guide, Ken Arnold, Eric Freeman and Susan Hupfer, Addison-Wesley, forthcoming.
• The Java Programming Language Second Edition, Ken Arnold and James Gosling, Addison-Wesley, 1998.
• Concurrent Programming in Java: Design Principles and Patterns, Doug Lea, Addison-Wesley, 1997.
• The Java Virtual Machine Specification, Tim Lindholm and Frank Yellin, Addison-Wesley, 1997.
• The Java Language Specification, James Gosling, Bill Joy and Guy Steele, Addison-Wesley, 1996.

Internet / WWW

• Web Server Technology Nancy J. Yeager and Robert E. McGrath, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1996.
• Web Proxy Servers, Luotonen, Prentice Hall, 1998
• The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, Edited by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1998.
• HyperText Transfer Protocol - HTTP/1.1, T. Berners-Lee, R. Fielding, H. Frystyk, J. Gettys, and J. Mogul, RFC #2068, January, 1997.
• Apache Group, Apache HTTP Server Version 1.3, May, 1998.
• HyperText Markup Language (HTML) Home Page

• Course Information (Postscript)
  Course Information (Text)

• The Course Newsgroup

The course newsgroup is the first place you should look for course-related announcements and for answers to course-related questions. You should read the newsgroup regularly.

You may read the course newsgroup using your favorite newsreader. Alternatively, you may use your WWW browser to read the group by clicking on the hypertext reference above. Some WWW browsers, like mosaic, require you to set the environment variable NNTPSERVER before reading newsgroups. If you have trouble reading the course newsgroup using your WWW browser, try this

        setenv NNTPSERVER news.math.uwaterloo.ca

before starting your browser. Better yet, add this line to your .cshrc file.

• GNU Online Documentation
• RCS paper
• RCS function list
• RCS ci man page
• RCS co man page

• Operating Systems Projects
• Operating System Research FAQ (HTML)
• Operating System FAQ list (HTML)

• An Advanced Socket Communication Tutorial
• UNIX Socket FAQ
• World Wide Web Consortium
• HTTP
• HTTP Version 1.1,
  R. Fielding, J. Gettys, J. Mogul, H. Frystyk Nielsen, and T. Berners-Lee, January, 1997.
  
• RFC Repository (Search Engine)
• IETF Internet Engineering Task Force
• Measurement Tools
• Name Server Operations Guide for BIND Release 4.9.5
• IP Next Generation (IPng)
• Network Bibliography
• Ascend's Glossary of Terms
• Web Proxy Bake-Off
• Advice on Research and Writing