18-845: Internet Services
Carnegie Mellon University, Spring 2020

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

1. Instructor

Prof. David O'Hallaron, droh@cs.cmu.edu, GHC 7517
Office hours: Mon 4:30-5:30pm (or by appt.)

TA: Andrew Yang, atyang@andrew.cmu.edu
Office hours: TBD

2. Organization

Class times: Mon and Wed, 2:30-3:50pm, DH 2105
Web page: www.ece.cmu.edu/~ece845
Class mailing list: 18-845@cs.cmu.edu

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 available in the campus bookstore and 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 version)

Legend: IP: individual project, GP: group project

Class Date Day Topic Projects Discussion Leader
1 01/13 Mon Intro and welcome Dave O'Hallaron
2 01/15 Wed System design principles IP out Dave O'Hallaron
3 01/20 Mon No class - MLK day ---
4 01/22 Wed Server design basics Dave O'Hallaron
5 01/27 Mon Event delivery mechanisms Dave O'Hallaron
6 01/29 Wed Measuring server capacity Sauruv Panda
7 02/03 Mon Motivating application: Google Search Meng Cao
8 02/05 Wed Stragglers: The tail at scale Bobbie Chen
9 02/10 Mon Consistent hashing: Chord Eugene Luo
10 02/12 Wed Google file system (GFS)/Colossus IP due 11:59pm Shrivar Bhuwalka
11 02/17 Mon Data processing: MapReduce Ditti Bagga
12 02/19 Wed Stream processing: Kafka/Samza Spenser Yu
13 02/24 Mon Advanced processing: Tensorflow Videet Singhai
14 02/26 Wed Classical replication: Paxos Adhitya Rajagopalan
15 03/02 Mon Modern replication: Aegean Ruolin Zan
16 03/04 Wed Lock services: Chubby Anja Kalaba
17 03/09 Mon No class - Spring break ---
18 03/11 Wed No class - Spring break ---
19 03/16 Mon No class - Remote instruction prep GP abstracts due, 11:59pm ---
20 03/18 Wed Distributed stores: BigTable Raghav Sharma
21 03/23 Mon Distributed stores: Spanner Adithya Raghuraman
22 03/25 Wed Distributed stores: memcached Aditi Paul
23 03/30 Mon Distributed stores: Dynamo Dimple Gandhi
24 04/01 Wed DRAM-based storage: RAMCloud Adolfo Victoria
25 04/06 Mon Datacenter management: Borg GP oral mid-term reports due, in class Nolan Hiehle (Google)
26 04/08 Wed Warehouse-scale computing Aditi Tripathi
27 04/13 Mon Virtual machines: VMWare Harsha Ganta
28 04/15 Wed Virtual machines: Xen Wenyan Liu
29 04/20 Mon No class - GP prep ---
30 04/22 Wed No class - GP prep ---
31 04/27 Mon No Class - GP prep --
32 04/29 Wed No Class - GP prep GP report due 11:59pm Sun, 5/3 ---
33 05/4 Mon ---
34 05/6 Wed GP Poster session via Zoom all
05/10 Sun GP final reports due Sunday 5/10, 11:59pm ---

6. Detailed course schedule (final version)

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 "*".

Bring a hardcopy (no email) of your critique with you to class and give it to the instructor after class. The instructor will grade it and return it to you next class.

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: No class - MLK day

Class 4: Server design: Basics

  • Note: Please write a single critique covering both papers.
  • *V. Pai, P. Druschel, and W. Zwaenepoel, Flash: An efficient and portable Web server, Proceedings of the USENIX 1999 Annual Technical Conference, 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: Event delivery mechanisms

  • *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)

Class 6: Measuring server capacity

  • *G. Banga and P. Druschel, Measuring the Capacity of a Web Server under Realistic Loads, World Wide Web Journal (Special issue on World Wide Web Characterization and Performance Evaluation), 2(1), May 1999. (pdf)

Class 7: 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)
  • Ian Rogers, The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works, May, 2002. (html)

Class 8: Stragglers: Tail at scale

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

Class 9: 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 SIGCOMM'01, Aug. 2001, (pdf)

Class 10: 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 11: Data processing: MapReduce

  • *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. (html)

Class 12: Stream processing: Kafka/Samza

  • Note: Please write a single critique covering both papers.
  • *Jay Kreps, Neha Narkhede, Jun Rao, Kafka: a Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing, NetDB'11, 2011. (pdf)
  • *Shadi A. Noghabi, Kartik Paramasivam, Yi Pan, Navina Ramesh, Jon Bringhurst, Indranil Gupta, and Roy H. Campbell, Samza: Stateful Scalable Stream Processing at LinkedIn, VLDB Endowment, Aug, 2017. (pdf)

Class 13: Advanced processing: TensorFlow

  • *Martin Abadi et al, TensorFlow: A System for Large Scale Machine Learning OSDI'16, 2016. (pdf)

Class 14: Classical replicaton: Paxos

  • *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)
  • Michael Swift, "Paxos, Agreement, Consensus", Lecture notes for CS 739, Spring 2012, Univ of Wisc, A clear and concise description of the algorithm and its behavior under various scenarios (pdf)
  • Angus MacDonald, Paxos by Example, Web post, 2018. (html). Helpful step-by-step example with multiple leaders.
  • Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout, In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm, USENIX, 2014. (pdf)
  • Leslie Lamport, Paxos Made Simple, ACM SIGACT News (Distributed Computing Column) 32, 4 (December 2001) 51-58. (pdf)

Class 15: Modern replication: Aegean

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

Class 16: 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 17: No class - Spring break

Class 18: No class - Spring break

Class 19: No class - Remote instruction prep

Class 20: 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 21: 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 22: Distributed stores: memcached

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

Class 23: 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 24: 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)

Class 25: 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 26: 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 27: 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)
  • 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 28: Virtual machines: Xen

  • Note: Please write a single critique covering both papers
  • *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)
  • *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 30: No class

    Class 31: No class

    Class 32: GP poster session