Introduction
In recent years, large investments have been made in massive data centers supporting cloud services, such as map-reduce jobs and online web services, by companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Facebook. Moreover, some companies like Amazon have provided public cloud services with shared storage, computation, and bandwidth resources. In this course, we will visit the critical technology trends and new challenges in cloud and data center designs for different trade-offs of performance, scalability, manageability, and cost across the application, infrastructure, and network layers. The course will include student presentations, discussions, and lectures. The readings will be selected from recent papers published in top systems and networking conferences.
Textbooks
You will be expected to read 2-3 papers a week.
There are no required textbooks for the course.
Prerequisites
This class is appropriate for graduate students with
previous background in networking.
Grading
There are no exams in this class. The course grade will be determined based on:
Reviews and class presentations/discussion (50%): Students are expected to write reviews for each class. One or two students will give a presentation and lead the discussions in each class.
A research project (50%): The semester-long project is an open-ended systems research project. Project topics are of your choice but should be related to cloud computing and data centers. Projects should be done in groups of two or three and include a systems building component.
Statement for Students with Disabilities
Any student requesting academic accommodations based on a disability is required to register with Disabil- ity Services and Programs (DSP) each semester. A letter of verification for approved accommodations can be obtained from DSP. Please be sure the letter is delivered to me (or to TA) as early in the semester as possible. DSP is located in STU 301 and is open 8:30 a.m.5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. The phone number for DSP is (213) 740-0776.
Statement on Academic Integrity
USC seeks to maintain an optimal learning environment. General principles of academic honesty include the concept of respect for the intellectual property of others, the expectation that individual work will be submitted unless otherwise allowed by an instructor, and the obligations both to protect ones own aca- demic work from misuse by others as well as to avoid using anothers work as ones own. All students are expected to understand and abide by these principles. Scampus, the Student Guidebook, contains the Student Conduct Code in Section 11.00, while the recommended sanctions are located in Appendix A: http://www.usc.edu/dept/publications/SCAMPUS/gov/. Students will be referred to the Office of Student Judicial Affairs and Community Standards for further review, should there be any suspicion of academic dishonesty. The Review process can be found at: http://www.usc.edu/student-affairs/SJACS/.