Course: Fall 2012 B534 Distributed Systems Graduate Course

Objectives
The Internet has greatly expanded the scope and importance of distributed systems to include Web 2.0 sites, Information retrieval (search), Utility (cloud) computing, P2P systems and the Internet of things. Further science is facing an unprecedented data deluge and the emergence of data oriented analysis as a fourth paradigm of scientific methodology after theory, experiment and simulation. This class will use these modern systems to introduce core technologies including communication, concurrency/parallelism, security, fault tolerance and programming models. In particular the course will cover systems and tools to support data intensive science applications. Students will get to know the latest research topics through paper readings and have the opportunity to understand some commercial cloud systems through projects using FutureGrid resources.

Scope and topics
The content of B534 will cover the design principles, systems architecture, and innovative applications of parallel, distributed, and cloud computing systems. These include massively parallel processors (MPP), supercomputing clusters, service-orient architecture (SOA), computational grids, P2P (peer-to-peer) networks, virtualized datacenters, cloud platforms, Internet of Things (IOT), and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). We will cover MapReduce (originated from functional languages) and associated languages but it will focus more on the principles and practice of building distributed systems than on languages.