18-845: Internet Services
Carnegie Mellon University, Spring 2023

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

1. Instructor

Prof. David O'Hallaron, droh@andrew.cmu.edu, GHC 7517
Office hours: Mon 4:30pm-6:00pm EST (or by appt.)

2. Organization

Class times: Mon and Wed, 2:00-3:20pm, WeH 4623


Web page: http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ece845
Class mailing list: 18-845@cs.cmu.edu (Ready as of 2/13/23)

Canvas: We will not be using Canvas.
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 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
    • Machines ghc{26..46} contain NVIDIA GeForc GTX 1080 GPUs. The Wikipedia entry for GeForce 10 GPUs provides useful information about this model of GPU. They support CUDA compute capability 6.1.
  • 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 (final)

Legend: GP: group project

Class Date Day Topic Projects Discussion Leader
1 01/18 Wed Intro and welcome Dave O'Hallaron
2 01/23 Mon System design principles Dave O'Hallaron
3 01/25 Wed Server design: basics Dave O'Hallaron
4 01/30 Mon Server design: advanced Dave O'Hallaron
5 02/01 Wed Motivating application: Google Search Abhinand Jha
6 02/06 Mon Stragglers: The tail at scale Yifan Zhang
7 02/08 Wed Consistent hashing: Chord Indrajit Bhosale
8 02/13 Mon Google file system (GFS)/Colossus Zilong Zhou
9 02/15 Wed Data processing: MapReduce Jiayi (Gary) Li
10 02/20 Mon Classical replication: Paxos Ankita Bhanjois
11 02/22 Wed Modern replication: Raft Xiaofeng Yan
12 02/27 Mon Modern replication: Aegean Guangrui Wang
13 03/01 Wed Lock services: Chubby Jonathan Ke
14 03/06 Mon No class - Spring break ---
15 03/08 Wed No class - Spring break ---
16 03/13 Mon Distributed stores: BigTable Yihan Yang
17 03/15 Wed Distributed stores: Spanner GP abstracts due, 11:59pm Liangyu Chi
18 03/20 Mon Distributed stores: memcached Mahesh Bapaty
19 03/22 Wed Distributed stores: Dynamo Chi-Chen Chang
20 03/27 Mon DRAM-based storage: RAMCloud Ziheng Yan
21 03/29 Wed Datacenter management: Borg Yufei Liu
22 04/03 Mon Warehouse-scale computing GP oral mid-term reports due, in class Jiarui (Gary) Li
23 04/05 Wed Virtual machines: VMWare Phoebe Hughes
24 04/10 Mon Virtual machines: Xen Neville Chima
25 04/12 Wed Virtual machines: Live Migration Yechu Bie
26 04/17 Mon No class - GP prep ---
27 04/19 Wed No class - GP prep ---
28 04/24 Mon No class - GP prep GP final reports due, 11:59pm (updated) ---
29 04/26 Wed No class - GP prep GP critiques due, 11:59pm (updated) ---
04/30 Sun GP camera-ready reports due Mon May 1 (updated), 11:59pm ---

6. Detailed course schedule (final)

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 "*". Please bring a hardcopy of your critique with you to class. We will not accept emailed critiques.

Class 1: Welcome and intro

Class 2: 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 3: Server design: Basics

  • *V. Pai, P. Druschel, and W. Zwaenepoel, Flash: An efficient and portable Web server, Proceedings of the USENIX 1999 Annual Technical Conference, 1999. (pdf)

Class 4: Server design: Advanced

  • Note: Please write a single critique covering both papers.
  • *Gaurav Banga, Jeff Mogul and Peter Druschel, A scalable and explicit event delivery mechanism for UNIX, in the Proceedings of the USENIX 1999 Technical Conference, June 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)

Class 5: 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)
    For background only. Do not critique:
    • Ian Rogers, The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works, May, 2002. (html) No need to critique this, but you might find the specific examples to be helpful.

    Class 6: Stragglers: Tail at scale

    • *Jeffrey Dean and Luiz Andre Barroso, The Tail at Scale, in Communications of the ACM, Feb. 2013, (pdf)

    Class 7: Consistent hashing: Chord

    • *I. Stoica, R. Morris, D. Karger, M. F. Kaashoek, H. Balakrishnan, Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications, in SIGCOMM01, Aug. 2001, (pdf)

    Class 8: Google file system (GFS)/Colossus

    • 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: Data processing: MapReduce

    • Note: Please write two critiques, one for each paper.
    • *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)
    • *J. Summers, The Friendship that Made Google Huge, New Yorker, Dec 3, 2018. Beautiful article about the 20-year friendship between Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and the unique pair programming approach they've used to build some of Google's most important systems. (pdf)
    • M. Zaharia, M. Chowdurey, M. Franklin, S. Shenkar, and I Stoica, Spark: Cluster computing with working sets, HotCloud10, 2010. (pdf)

    Class 10: Classical replicaton: Paxos

    • Note: Please write a single critique covering both papers.
    • *Michael Swift, "Paxos, Agreement, Consensus", Lecture notes for CS 739, Spring 2012, Univ of Wisc, A clear and concise description, with psuedo-code, of the Paxos algorithm and its behavior under various scenarios. (pdf)
    • *Tushar Chandra, Robert Griesemer, Joshua Redstone, Paxos Made Live - An Engineering Perspective, in ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC '07), Aug, 2007. (pdf)
    For background only. No need to critique:
    • Angus MacDonald, Paxos by Example, Web post, 2018. (html). Helpful step-by-step example with multiple leaders.
    • Leslie Lamport, Paxos Made Simple, ACM SIGACT News (Distributed Computing Column) 32, 4 (December 2001) 51-58. (pdf). Maybe not so simple :-)

    Class 11: Modern replication: Raft

    • *Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout, In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm, USENIX, 2014. (pdf)

    Class 12: Modern replication: Aegean

    • *R. Aksoy and M. Dapritsos, Aegean: Replication beyond the client-server model, in SOSP'19, October, 2019. (pdf)

    Class 13: 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 14: No class - Spring break

    Class 15: No class - Spring break

    Class 16: Distributed Stores: 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: 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 18: Distributed stores: memcached

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

    Class 19: Distributed stores: Dynamo

    • *G. DeCandia, D. Hastorun, M. Jampani, G. Kakulapati, A. Lakshman, A. Pilchin, S. Sivasubramnian, P. Vosshal, and W. Vogels, Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store, SOSP'07, Oct. 2007, (pdf)

    Class 20: DRAM-based storage: RAMCloud

    • *D. Ongaro, S. Rumble, R. Stutsman, J. Ousterhout, and M. Rosenblum, Fast Crash Recovery in RAMCloud, SOSP'11, Oct. 2011 (pdf)
    For background only. No need to critique:
    • 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 21: 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 22: Warehouse-scale computing

    • Note: Write a single critique covering Chapters 1-3, and 5.
    • *Luiz Andre Barrosa, Urs Holzle, and Parthasarathy Ranganathan, The Datacenter as a Computer: Designing Warehouse-scale Machines, Third Edition, Morgan & Claypool, 2018. (pdf)

Class 23: Virtual machines: VMWare

  • *K. Adams, and O. Agesen, A Comparison of Software and Hardware Techniques for x86 Virtualization, In Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems (ASPLOS'06), 2006. (pdf)
For background only. Do not critique:
  • G. Neiger, A. Santoni, F. Leung, D. Rodgers, R. Uhlig, "Intel Virtualization Technology: Hardware Support for Efficient Processor Virtualization", Intel Technology Journal, Aug, 2006. Please skip all discussion of the Itaniums VT-i (pdf)
  • 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)
  • Mendel Rosenblum and Tal Garfinkel, Virtual Machine Monitors: Current Technology and Future Trends, IEEE Computer, May, 2005. (pdf)
  • 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 24: 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 25: Virtual machines: Live migration

  • *Christopher Clark, Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Jacob Gorm Hanseny, Eric July, Christian Limpach, Ian Pratt, Andrew Warfield, Live Migration of Virtual Machines, NSDI '05, 2005. (pdf)

Class 26: No class

Class 27: No class

Class 28: No class

Class 29: No class