Large Scale Networked Systems
http://dsl.cs.uchicago.edu/Courses/CS347-2002

Wednesdays: 12:00 - 1:20, Ry 277

Fridays: 11:30 - 12:50, Ry 277

Instructor: Prof. Ian Foster
TA: Adriana Iamnitchi

Motivation

Course structure

Schedule

Reading List

Project Ideas

Motivation

Current research in distributed systems often deals with decentralized, dynamic, large-scale systems. Innovative self-configuring overlay networks such as Gnutella are fostering research in the domain of large-scale, dynamic systems, often labeled Peer-to-Peer systems. This seminar course aims to explore some of the tools necessary for doing research in this domain.

Course Structure

The course is structured with the twin goals of providing (a) an in-depth understanding of current topics in Internet research, and (b) experience in the review, analysis, and presentation of advanced technical material. The class workload has a participation component and a final project.

Participation

In each class we cover two research papers. Before the class, you must all read the papers and develop brief answers to a set of standard questions, as follows:

1. State the main contribution of the paper
2. Critique the main contribution. 
   1. Rate the significance of the paper on a scale of 5 (breakthrough), 4 (significant contribution), 3 (modest contribution), 2 (incremental contribution), 1 (no contribution or negative contribution). Explain your rating in a sentence or two.
   2. Rate how convincing the methodology is. You may consider some of the following questions (use what is relevant): do the claims and conclusions follow from the experiments? Are the assumptions realistic? Are the experiments well designed? Are there different experiments that would be more convincing? Are there other alternatives the authors should have considered? (And, of course, is the paper free of methodological errors?)
   3. What is the most important limitation of the approach?
3. What are the three strongest and/or most interesting ideas in the paper?
4. What are the three most striking weaknesses in the paper?
5. Name three questions that you would like to ask the authors?
6. Detail an interesting extension to the work not mentioned in the future work section.
7. Optional comments on the paper that you’d like to see discussed in class.

You may find the article The task of a referee useful. Your reviews must be submitted by midnight before class (firm deadline!) by email to anda@cs.uchicago.edu. Your submissions will be posted on the Web before class. 

Each paper is discussed in class. Discussions will be lead by one or more students and may include a brief presentation of the paper (5-7 minutes). You should follow this guidelines on how to handle these presentations, but in brief, you should:

• Moderate at least one class discussion (the number of moderated discussions per student depends on the number of students in the class). The moderator is evaluated based on the number of active participants and the quality of the discussion. 

• Participate in other moderators' discussions. Note that you need do this if you want an active discussion session when you'll moderate next time... 

Deliverables of the leading group:

1. Prepare a copy of you discussion plan for each class participant. Before class, send your plan to Anda.

2. Master critique (see guidelines) is due before the class following the class discussion moderated by your group.

3. The leading group does NOT need to turn in paper evaluations for that class.

Final Project

Students taking the course for credit are required to complete a project and a paper describing the results of this project. The project is intended to provide you with an opportunity to gain experience with research in a topic related to the content of the course.

In order to provide enough time for reasonable progress, as well as instructor feedback, the following milestones must be adhered to:

• End of week 2: email to foster@cs.uchicago.edu with one-page statement of the project you propose to do, noting the problem, proposed approach, and relevant reading. (Note that if you want to discuss this with the instructor, you need to do it ahead of this!)
• End of week 5: present 5-page summary of the problem you are tackling, the proposed approach, initial results, and expected structure of the final paper, which should be 10-20 pages.
• End of week 9: submit paper; present final paper.
• During week 10: present final paper.

The final projects are graded and evaluated by all students: each student reads all final papers and assists to all final project presentations and for each paper/presentation answers the same standard questionnaire as for the papers read during the course.

Grade

The final grade reflects the performance as moderator, as paper reader and reviewer, as evaluator of the colleagues’ projects, and the quality of the own project, as evaluated by instructor.

Reading list (the final version will go into schedule).

* Instructor is traveling: we will need to either reschedule, or proceed with the TA