15-440, Fall 2012: Distributed Systems

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Prerequisites

Because this course has a big project component, you must be proficient in C and Java programming on UNIX systems. It is required that you have taken 15-213 and gotten a "C-" or higher since many of the programming skills you will need are taught in that course. If you received a C in 15-213, you must meet with your academic advisor to discuss your background before taking 15-440, perhaps taking an additional course to sharpen your systems skills.

Learning Objectives

After this course, students will have learned to...

• Implement and structure distributed systems programs;
• Write programs that can interoperate using well-defined protocols
• Debug highly concurrent code that spans multiple programs running on multiple cores and machines
• Reason about distributed algorithms for locking, synchronizationa and concurrency, scheduling, and replication
• Use standard network communication primitives such as UDP and TCP
• Understand the general properties of networked communication necessary for distributed systems programming in clusters and on the Internet
• Employ and create common paradigms for easing the task of distributed systems programming, such as distributed filesystems, RPC, and MapReduce. Be able to clearly elucidate their benefits, drawbacks, and limitations.
• Identify the security challenges faced by distributed systems programs;
• Be able to select appropriate security solutions to meet the needs of commonly encountered distributed programming scenarios.

Course Staff

Teaching Assistants

Name	Email	Office	Tel	Hours
Bin Fan	binfan AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu	GHC 9003	412-268-4751	Mondays 4:00pm-5:00pm
Anthony Santos	aas1 AT andrew DOT cmu DOT edu	GHC 4122	305-215-8409	Tuesdays 3:30pm-4:30pm
Alexander Rodriguez	alexande AT andrew DOT cmu DOT edu	GHC 5207	510-593-5540	Thursdays 7:00pm-8:00pm
Timmy Zhu	timothyz AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu	GHC 7010	412-268-4973	Mondays Noon-1:00pm

Instructors

Name	Email	Office	Tel	Hours
David Andersen	dga AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu	GHC 9109	412-268-3064	W 11:00 - 11:59
Randy Bryant	bryant AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu	GHC 5113	412-268-8821	F 14:30 - 15:30

Course Secretary

Kathy McNiff, kmm AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu, GHC 9213, Tel: 412-268-5099

Office Hours

See individual course staff entries above.

Course Policies

Collaboration

Students are encouraged to talk to each other, to the TAs, to the instructors, or to anyone else about any of the assignments. Any assistance, though, must be limited to discussion of the problem and sketching general approaches to a solution. Each student must write out his or her own solutions to the homework. The project handouts have more detailed information about collaboration when working on the projects, but, basically, each programming project group must write their own code and documentation for the programming projects done as a group.

Consulting another student's or group's solution is prohibited, and submitted solutions may not be copied from any source. These and any other form of collaboration on assignments constitute cheating. If you have any question about whether some activity would constitute cheating, please feel free to ask the instructors.

You may not supply work that you complete during 15-440 to other students in future instances of this course or for use in future instances of this course (just as you may not use work completed by students who've taken the course previously).

Piazza Policy

This course uses the Piazza web site for answering questions. The home Piazza page for this course is at: https://piazza.com/cmu/fall2012/15440/home. When posting questions on Piazza, students must keep in mind the collaboration guidelines noted above, and use those guidelines to determine:

• Whether to mark your post "private to the instructors" or public;
• How much detail and help to provide in an answer to a fellow student

Part of the learning process is struggling with the material until you arrive at the right insight for you to understand it. Posting too much detail in response to a request for assistance can impair learning. On the other hand, sometimes it's great to be nudged in the right direction when you're not able to get out of a rut. And, of course, misunderstandings of the assignment or tools available should be helped rapidly. Please use your best judgement when posting to the Piazza site, as if you were collaborating with your friends in person. A few rough guidelines:

• Please do post and answer publicly: Misunderstandings of the assignment; clarifications about the requirements; bugs in the assignment spec or reference implementation or tests; small, detailed questions about the operation of system calls, functions, etc. Things that look like they'd go in the FAQ are good candidates for asking or answering.
• Please don't post or answer publicly: More than a few lines of code; in-depth explanations of how your system works; questions about the best approach for architecting the system at a high level; questions about your grade; problems with your partner; etc.

Please use your judgement between these two examples. If you post privately, please let us know whether or not it would be OK to mark the post public if we feel it would be beneficial to the class to make it public.

Late Policy

Take project and homework deadlines seriously. Our experience is that students often seriously underestimate the effort involved in programming assignments and projects. If we give you 4 weeks to complete an assignment, there is typically a reason. In the interest of fairness, we have adopted the following late policy:

• Each student is given a total of 2 "free points" to use during the semester.
• One free point can be used to extend the deadline of any homework assignment by a single day with no penalty.
• One free point is needed to extend the deadline of the single-person Project 1.
• Two free points are needed to extend the deadline of the two-person Projects 2 or 3 by a single day with no penalty (you and your partner might each contribute a point).
• In the absence of free points, the deadline for any assignment can be extended with a 10% penalty per day.
• No deadline can be extended by more than two days, regardless of how many free points you have saved up. Assignments will NOT be accepted 48 hours after the due date.
• If you are ill: If you have a medical note, you may turn in your assignments late without using free points. Please contact the instructors to arrange a reasonable replacement turn-in time. You must notify us before the due-date. Without a medical note, you must use your free points as you would with any other reason for being late.

Re-Grading

If you think we made a mistake in grading, please return the assignment with a note explaining your concern to the course secretary no later than two weeks after the day the assignment was returned. We will have the question re-graded by the person responsible for grading that question.

Resources

• Class newsgroup: academic.cs.15-440
  If you have a question about a project handout or a technical issue, there is an excellent chance that other students have the same question. Please read the newsgroup to see if there has been traffic, and consider posting your questions there.
• Announcements newsgroup: academic.cs.15-440.announce
• Staff mailing list: staff-440 at cs dot cmu dot edu
  If you have a question you believe is particular to your circumstances and should not be posted in a public forum (e.g., one that involves posting the solution to homework problems), send mail to the staff list, which reaches the instructors and TAs. Questions of general interest sent to the staff list will probably be replied to via the newsgroup. If your question involves a confidential personal or academic-conduct issue, you should probably contact one of the instructors in person or send mail to both.
• Suggested study problems - if you'd like a bit more structure to help guide your studying, we list some problems from the book that you might find helpful.