CS 595 - Design and Analysis of Distributed System Infrastructures

CS 595 - Design and Analysis of Distributed System Infrastructures
Spring, 2004
Instructors: Wai Gen Yee and Shangping Ren
Time: 1:50 - 3:05pm, Tuesdays and Thursdays
Location: SB233

Description:

The goal of this class is to build a distributed system infrastructure. Our focus this semester is to design and build a peer-to-peer (P2P) system. The artifact that we will generate in this class is a software infrastructure that can serve as the basis for future application-level enhancements. We will take a structured approach to system design, spending a couple of weeks defining our goals and outlining our requirements.

The rest of the semester will be spent coding the system and reading relevant research papers. Our intent is to expose students to research issues emerging distributed architectures while giving them hands-on experience.

Our first goal is to provide the basic functionality that exists in well-known P2P file-sharing systems, such as Gnutella and Napster. Once accomplished, we will consider enhancements to the infrastructure. Possible enhancements include incorporating support for mobile peers or support for database-like functionality (e.g., transaction processing).

Workload:

We basically want our students to participate in class, read papers, write code, and document their code. Items therefore include:

Class participation.
Read one or two papers per week.
Initial project design document.
Code and documentation.
Post implementation documentation.
Written report.

Intended audience:

This class can be very exciting, but is intended for mature students; it will bring together most of the skills learned in a computer science curriculum. Student involvement is vital in all phases of the course from conceptualization, to high-level design, to low-level implementation. Participation and the ability to work in a team is a must.

Students should also have the ability to program and read research papers. Some of the expected programming skills include the ability to write system level software modules that communicate with each other and manipulate the file system (most likely in C++). Typical research papers can be found by following links from Drs. Yee and Ren's Web sites (www.cs.iit.edu/~yee, and www.cs.iit.edu/~ren). This class is also suitable for students who are considering careers in research.

Feel free to contact either Drs. Yee (yee@iit) or Ren (ren@iit) if you have any questions.