Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 21:46:05 GMT Server: NCSA/1.5 Content-type: text/html CS 835 - Seminar on Networked Computing Systems

CS 835 - Seminar on Networked Computing Systems
Fall 1996

Instructors: Professors Almeida, Bestavros, Crovella, and Yates.
Time: Monday 1-3 pm
Location: MCS B46
Credit: May be taken as audit, or for up to 4 credits

Course Description

This seminar will take a hands-on approach to examining the design of current networked computing systems. In particular we will adopt as our case study the software system associated with a World Wide Web server. The course will consist of code walk-throughs and lectures. Code walk-throughs will include: at the kernel level (namely in Linux), the network, file system, and process scheduling functions; and at the application level, one Web server (Apache). Lectures will cover research issues in server design, performance modeling, and simulation techniques. This seminar will be a prerequisite or corequisite for participating in the Commonwealth Server Project, which is being led by the instructors; however any student who is interested in studying the implementation of a networked computer system is invited to attend. We will be asking attendees to be notetakers for a week. As a notetaker, your job is to keep track of the main themes of the discussion and any interesting points made by any of the participants.

Participation in this seminar is by encouragement/consent of one of the instructors. Students taking this course for credit will be expected to complete a related project chosen in consultation with one of the instructors. The project cannot serve also as a Master's project, however, if a two-phase proposal is accepted by the instructor the second phase can serve as a MS project. Students may form teams to work on projects, however, the project scope must scale linearly with the team size, and work must be explicitly load balanced in a fair way. It's also OK to take this course for no credit, but to use it to lead on to an MS project during a subsequent semester.

We will schedule a brownbag (or two) at the end of the semester. Each student participating will be asked to talk for a short time (10 mins) on their project or on a related topic.

Finally, for more information on the Commonwealth Server Project, follow this link.

Course Schedule

Here's the proposed week-by-week schedule of topics we'd like to cover. During weeks 5 through 9 our code walkthroughs will take us through version 2.0.10 of the Linux kernel (see linux-2.0.10/ under /sw/course/cs835-f96/). During weeks 10 and 11 our code walkthroughs will be through version 1.1.1 of the Apache server (see apache_1.1.1/ in the same place). If you're a presenter or a scribe for a particular week, please mail your notes to djy@cs.bu.edu so that they can be linked to this home page.

Bibliography

The OCEANS Project has a really nice bibliograpy in BibTex format. Here are some references out on the Web ...

[Abra95] M. Abrams, C. R. Standridge, G. Abdulla, S. Williams, and E. A. Fox, Caching Proxies: Limitations and Potentials, Proc. of 4th Intl. World-Wide Web Conference, December, 1995.
[AFS96] Transarc Corporation, The AFS File System in Distributed Computing Environments: White Paper, May 1996.
[Alme96] V. A. F. Almeida, J. M. de Almeida, and C. S. Murta, Performance Analysis of a WWW Server, Proc. CMG Conference, 1996. Note: not viewable with ghostview, but will print.
[Ande96] E. Anderson and D. Patterson, The Magicrouter: An Application of Fast Packet Interposing, 1996.
[Arli96] M. F. Arlitt, A Performance Study of Internet Web Servers, MSc. Thesis, June, 1996.
[Asam95] S. Asami, N. Talagala, T. Anderson, K. Lutz, and D. Patterson, The Design of Large-Scale, Do-It-Yourself RAIDs, 1995.
[Basu95] A. Basu, V. Buch, W. Vogels, T. von Eicken, U-Net: A User-Level Network Interface for Parallel and Distributed Computing, Proc. of the 15th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, December, 1995.
[Blum96] M. Blumrich, Network Interface for Protected, User-Level Communication, PhD. Thesis, June 1996.
[Bolo96] J-C. Bolot and P. Hoschka, Performance engineering of the World Wide Web: Application to dimensionning and cache design, Proc. of the 5th World-Wide Web Conference, May 1996.
[Dahl96] M. Dahlin, Serverless Network File Systems, PhD. Thesis, December 1995.
[Drus96] P. Druschel and G. Banga, Lazy Receiver Processing: A New Network Subsystem Architecture for Server Systems, Proc. of the 2nd OSDI Conference, Oct 1996.
[Dubn96] C. Dubnicki, L. Iftode, E. Felten and K. Li, Software Support for Virtual Memory-Mapped Communication, Proc. of the 10th International Parallel Processing Symposium, April 1996.
[Engl96] D. R. Engler and M. F. Kaashoek, DPF: Fast, Flexible Message Demultiplexing using Dynamic Code Generation, Proc. of ACM Sigcomm, August, 1996.
[Katz94] E. D. Katz, M. Butler, and R. McGrath, A Scalable HTTP Server: The NCSA Prototype, (HTML, PostScript), Proc. of the 1st Intl. World-Wide Web Conference, May 1994.
[Kwan95] T. T. Kwan, R. E. Mcgrath, and D. A. Reed, User Access Patterns to NCSA's World Wide Web Server, (an abridged version appeared in the November 1995 issue of IEEE Computer )
[Mark96] E. P. Markatos, Main Memory Caching of Web Documents, Proc. of the 5th World-Wide Web Conference, May 1996.
[Mitz96] M. Mitzenmacher, The Power of Two Choices in Randomized Load Balancing, PhD. Thesis, 1996.
[Mogu95a] J. C. Mogul, The Case for Persistent-Connection HTTP, DEC WRL Research Report 95/4, May 1995.
[Mogu95b] J. C. Mogul, Network Behavior of a Busy Web Server and its Clients, DEC WRL Research Report 95/5, October 1995.
[Padm94] V. N. Padmanabhan and J. C. Mogul, Improving HTTP Latency, Proc. of the 2nd Intl. WWW Conference, Oct 1994.
[Wall96] D. A. Wallach, D. R. Engler, and M. F. Kaashoek ASHs: Application-specific Handlers for High-performance Messaging, Proc. of ACM Sigcomm, August, 1996.
[Will96] S. Williams, M. Abrams C. R. Standridge, G. Abdulla, and E. A. Fox, Removal Policies in Network Caches for World-Wide Web Documents, Proc. of ACM Sigcomm, August, 1996.
[Yeag96] N. Yeager and R. McGrath (both of NCSA), Web Server Technology: The Advanced Guide for World-Wide Web Information Providers is a recent book.

Other Interesting Projects

The OCEANS Project also has a nice collection of links to interesting projects (please excuse the duplicates below).

HORIZON Project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Linux in High-Performance Computing.
NOW Project at the University of California at Berkeley.
The Open Group (formerly OSF) Research Institute, in Cambridge, works on Web and operating system technologies.
PABLO Project also at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Scalable I/O Initiative.
SHRIMP Project at Princeton University.
U-Net Project at Cornell University.
World Wide Web Traffic Analysis at Virginia Tech.


Maintainer: David Yates Created on: 1996.08.30 Updated on: 1996.10.08