COMP 6611B: Topics on Cloud Computing and Data Analytics Systems [Fall 2016]

COMP 6611B will be offered in Fall 2016 by Wei Wang. The course is scheduled twice a week at the following time in Room 2504 (Lift 25-26):

• Wednesday, 3:00 pm – 4:20 pm

• Friday, 3:00 pm – 4:20 pm

You can find the detailed schedule here.

Announcements

• 09/09: The presentation schedule has been updated. Check here for details.

• 06/09: Bid a paper presentation today by putting your name here.

• 06/09: We will discuss two papers, MapReduce and Spark, in the Friday class (09/09). Please choose one paper and submit your review, brief or detailed, to the instructor's email before the discussion.

• 06/09: Follow this Facebook billboard to find teammates and exchange ideas on the course project.

Course Description

Cloud computing realizes the long-held ambition of big data processing. By pooling a huge number of commodity servers into a large cluster, cloud computing allows big data applications, such as web search and social networks, to scale out to thousands of nodes, accommodating their ever-growing computing demands in spite of the stalling processor speed. Building computer systems at such a large scale poses a number of challenges on system design, implementation, and management.

In this course, we will examine advanced research topics in Cloud systems, data processing frameworks, and networking. Example topics include the architecture of Cloud datacenters and networks, state-of-the-art data processing frameworks, Cloud workload characteristics, resource management and scheduling, and the storage systems. The course will be paper reading-based coupled with open-ended course projects.

The course is available for final-year UG students with system and networking background who wish to pursue further research in the area of Cloud and big data systems.

For more details, please check the course info and the reading list.

Course Objectives

The purpose of this course is to study the critical technologies and their future trend in Cloud systems and data analytics frameworks. We will survey various system design problems, discuss their technical challenges, and present state-of-the-art research results. We will also examine the design philosophy, the generality of the technique, and the potential limitations of existing solutions.

The course will be in a form of seminar, where students are given papers to read before attending the class. Students are expected to learn:

• How to read a research paper in a critical way;

• How to write a critical analysis of the research described in a paper;

• How to articulate intuitions and insights into a research paper;

• How to extract the key ideas and distill complex problems into their essence.

Text Book

This course does not have a required textbook. Instead, all the course materials come from seminal, noteworthy, or representative papers published in the recent top conferences. Please check the reading list here.

Grading

• Class participation: 10%

• Paper summary and critic review: 25%

• Paper presentation and discussion: 25%

• Course project: 40%