CSC 724: Advanced Distributed Systems

Spring 2018
Credits: 3
Meeting Times: Tuesday/Thursday, 3pm - 4:15pm
Meeting Location: EBII 1226
Wolfware Course Web

Instructor Information:

Teaching Assistant:

Course Objectives: 

This course explores design and implementation principles in modern distributed systems. In particular, the course will emphasize on recent techniques used by real-world distributed systems such as cloud systems, enterprise data center, and peer-to-peer file sharing (e.g., BitTorrent). Students will learn the state of the art in distributed system architectures, algorithms, and performance evaluation methodologies. Topics include canonical distributed concepts such as remote procedure call, distributed objects, replication, distributed system security, concensus protocol, and recent distributed system technologies such as peer-to-peer, grid, autonomic computing, distributed massive data processing/Google map-reduce, system machine learning,  distributed system debugging, multi-core systems, distributed virtualization. On completing this course, the student should be able to the following:

Text Books:

There are no assigned textbooks for this course. Topics will be covered during in-class lectures, and through course notes made available on this web page.

Links to the supplementary material in the form of research papers related to each topic are included in this syllabus. PDF for most papers is available through the NCSU library web site, which has full-text access to most recent ACM and IEEE journals and conferences. A number of supplemental distributed system textbooks are also available:

Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design, (4th Edition), G. Coulouris, J. Dollimore, and T. Kindberg
Distributed Systems (2nd Edition), Sape Mullender
Distributed Systems: Principles and Paradigms, Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Maarten van Steen

Course Description: 

Distributed systems have become the fundamental computing infrastructure for many important real-world applications such as Internet search engine, media streaming servers, online file sharing, information analytics, and scientific exploration. This course explores design and implementation principles in modern distributed systems. In particular, the course will emphasize on recent techniques used by real-world distributed systems such as peer-to-peer file sharing (e.g., BitTorrent), enterprise data center, and Internet search engine (Google). Students will learn the state of the art in distributed system architectures, algorithms, and performance evaluation methodologies. Topics include i) traditional distriubted computing concepts (e.g., distriubted objects, middleware, replication, distributed system security, and concensus protocol); and ii) recent emergent distributed system techniques such as peer-to-peer systems, massive data processing, Grid, and autonomic computing. Students will have opportunities to not only learn the common design methodology of many important distributed systems, but also gain hands-on experience through project implementations. The majority of course materials will be drawn from classic papers and current state-of-the-art work. The instructor will lecture for the first half of the semester and students will present papers and projects in the second half of the semester. Students will read and review papers ahead of time, participate in class discussions, present at least one research topic during the course, and do a term project individually or in a two-member team. Students will also write a paper (as well as review other students' papers) describing their project and present their work at the end of the course, in a "conference" format designed to give students an experience similar to that of participating in a professional conference.

Prerequisites:

CSC501 or equivalents. Programming in C++ or Java in Unix environment. If you are not sure whether you can attend this course, please consult the instructor.

Tentative Grading Policy

Written reviews 20%, class participation 20% (presentation: 10%, discussion: 10%), project 60% (proposal writeup 5%, proposal presentation 5%, Project MidReview Presentation  5%, demo 15%, final presentation 10%, Final write-up 20%)

Late policy: Calculated by the time recorded in the assignment emails received to the instructor. Students will lose 25% for each 24-hour period they are late on reviews, project, or paper.

Paper Review:

Review guidelines: Provide a paragraph of summary about the paper, a paragraph of 2-3 strong points of the paper (i.e., Why the paper should be accepted), a paragraph of 2-3 weak points of the paper (i.e., why the paper should be rejected),  brainstorming ideas for developing new research ideas related to the work described in the paper(optional).

Project:

Both project proposal and final report should follow typical paper requirements using ACM Double-Column Paper format. The project proposal should include abstract, introduction, proposed approaches, and related work. The final project report should include a full paper content including abstract, introduction, design and algorithms, experiment evaluation, related work, and conclusion. We will organize a mini-conference for the students to present their project work. Three best papers will be selected during the mini-conference.

Class Schedule (Tentative):


 W

 Date

Topic

Assigned Readings

Assignments









1


   1/9

Introduciton [slides]


  • Chapter 1, Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design

Investigate your term project idea and do preparation for it. A list of candidate project topics will also be provided to you on the class. Talk to the instructor about your project idea and talk to other students in forming a two-three members group. Email the instructor to setup the appointment. 


1/15 midnight: review due for

 


   1/11



Replication [slides]


2

1/16


Project Testbed [slides]

Investigate your term project idea and do preparation for it. Talk to the instructor about your project idea and talk to other students in forming a group if you would like to work in a group.

1/22 midnight: review due for


Sunday midnight: Paper presentation signup due. Please send an email to the TA to bid three papers in the list below and list your choices in decreasing order. You will be allocated with one paper to present based on the FCFS policy and paper availability.







1/18






Project Testbed[slides]


3

1/23


Consensus Protocol
[slides]

 

1/29 midnight: review due for


1/25



Consensus Protocol
[slides]




  

4

1/30

Consensus Protocol
[slides]






 

2/5 midnight: project proposal due.

2/1





Guest Lecture by Dr. Daniel Dean



5

2/6

 Autonomic Computing
[slides]

2/12 midnight: reviews due 

 




     2/8


Peer-to-Peer Systems
[slides]

6

2/13

Overlay Networks
[slides]



  • D. Andersen and H. Balakrishnan and F. Kaashoek and R. Morris, Resilient Overlay Networks, Proc. 18th ACM SOSP, 2001.
  • Y. Chu and S. G. Rao and S. Seshan and H. Zhang, A Case For End System Multicast, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication (JSAC), Special Issue on Networking Support for Multicast", 2002.

 

2/19 midnight: reviews due 

 

2/15

Big Data
[slides]

7

2/20

System Research Methodology [slides]

2/26 midnight: reviews due

2/22

 Project Proposal Presentation
  • Anshul Chandra, Cautam Verma, Consys: A hybrid approach to system diagnosis
  • Pratik Singh, Anirudha Tambolkar, Using Hierarchical Temporal Memory for Real Time Anomaly Prediction in Distributed Systems
  • Bhavesh Kasliwal, Rishabh Sinha, System Diagnosis using Console Logs
  • Anjali Doneria, Dipanjan Nag, Varun Garg, Anomaly based Intrusion Detection System to Enhance Security in Cloud Computing Systems
  • Fogo Tunde-Onadele, Darshan Patel, Analyzing the Overhead of Security Patching on Containers
  • Mayur Phadte, Saikrishna Vasudevan, Distributed Computing using Smartphones for Parellel Computations
  • Rushikesh Ghapande, Abhash Jain, Siddharth Heggadahalli, Blockchain - Distributed Ledger Technology for Digital Trust
  • Xingyao Huang, Zhikang Zhang, Weijie Zhou, Elastic IaaS Management System
  • Zhen Guo, Dependency-aware Dynamic Resource Management in Distributed Systems

8

2/27

 Student presentation

No paper reading assigned. You should spend time on your term projects.

3/1

 Student presentation

9

3/6
Spring Break
  • No Class

 

No paper reading assigned. You should spend time on your term projects.

3/9
Spring Break
  • No Class

10

3/13

 Student presentation
  1. Daniel Dean, Hiep Nguyen, Xiaohui Gu, "UBL: Unsupervised Behavior Learning for Predicting Performance Anomalies in Virtualized Cloud Systems”, Proc. of ACM International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC), San Jose, CA, September, 2012. - Darshan Patel(dpatel12)
  2. Yongmin Tan, Hiep Nguyen, Zhiming Shen, Xiaohui Gu, Chitra Venkatramani, Deepak Rajan, "PREPARE: Predictive Performance Anomaly Prevention for Virtualized Cloud Systems”, Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Macau, China, June, 2012. - Rishabh Sinha(rsinha2)
No paper reading assigned. You should spend time on your term projects.

3/15

 Student presentation

11

    3/20

Project MidReview



No paper reading assigned. You should spend time on your term projects.


   3/22


Project MidReview




12

   3/27
Project MidReview



No paper reading assigned. You should spend time on your term projects.
 

3/29

Student presentation



13

4/3

Student presentation

 


No paper reading assigned. You should spend time on your term projects.

 


4/5

Student presentation



14
   
     4/10

Student presentation



No paper reading assigned. You should spend time on your term projects.


    4/12

Student presentation


15
 
   4/17
Student presentation


No paper reading assigned. You should spend time on your term projects.
   4/19
No Class

16

   4/24

 Project Demo

May 7th midnight: final project report due, project source code and document due

Your project source code and document submission should be a single zip file. The zip file should include your system source code including all other dependent packages, the experimental subjects used in the project report, instructions on how to set up and use the system to reproduce the experimental results, and other documents that help others understand your tool and source code.




   4/26



  Project Demo
 
Project presentation on 4/27

1pm-5:30pm
 


 

 

Suggested Topics for Student Presentations (You can suggest to the instructor the papers that are not in this list but you would like to present):


Automatic Distributed System Management
  1. Yongle Zhang et al., Pensieve: Non-Intrusive Failure Reproduction for Distributed Systems using the Event Chaining Approach, Proc. of SOSP 2017. - Saikrishna Vasudevan(svasude4)
  2. Jonathan Kaldor et al., Canopy: An End-to-End Performance Tracing And Analysis System, Proc. of SOSP 2017. - Varun Garg(vsgarg)
  3. Kelvin Pei et al., DeepXplore: Automated Whitebox Testing of Deep Learning Systems, Proc. of SOSP 2017 - Siddharth Heggadahalli(ssheggad)
  4. Peipei Wang, Hiep Nguyen, Xiaohui Gu, Shan Lu, RDE: Replay DEbuggging for Diagnosing Production Site Failures, Proc. of SRDS 2016.
  5. Daniel Dean, Hiep Nguyen, Xiaohui Gu, Hui Zhang, Junghwan Rhee, Nipun Arora, Geoff Jiang, PerfScope: Practical Online Server Performance Bug Inference in Production Cloud Computing Infrastructures", Proc. of SOCC 2014.
  6. Daniel Dean, Hiep Nguyen, Peipei Wang, Xiaohui Gu, PerfCompass: Toward Runtime Performance Anomaly Fault Localization for Infrastructure-as-a-Service Clouds, Proc. of HotCloud 2014. - Bhavesh Kasliwal(bkasliw)
  7. Hiep Nguyen, Daniel J. Dean, Kamal Kc, Xiaohui Gu, Insight: In-situ Online Service Failure Path Inference in Production Computing Infrastructures", Proc. of USENIX ATC 2014.
  8. Hiep Nguyen, Zhiming Shen, Yongmin Tan, Xiaohui Gu,"FChain: Toward Black-box Online Fault Localization for Cloud Systems”, Proc. of ICDCS 2013. - Dipanjan Nag(dnag) 
  9. T. Xu, et al., Do Not Blame Users for Misconfigurations, Proc. of ACM SOSP 2013. - Gautam Verma(gverma)
  10. Daniel Dean, Hiep Nguyen, Xiaohui Gu, "UBL: Unsupervised Behavior Learning for Predicting Performance Anomalies in Virtualized Cloud Systems”, Proc. of ACM International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC), San Jose, CA, September, 2012. - Darshan Patel(dpatel12)
  11. Yongmin Tan, Hiep Nguyen, Zhiming Shen, Xiaohui Gu, Chitra Venkatramani, Deepak Rajan, "PREPARE: Predictive Performance Anomaly Prevention for Virtualized Cloud Systems”, Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Macau, China, June, 2012. - Rishabh Sinha(rsinha2)
  12. Mona Attariyan, Michael Chow, Jason Flinn, "X-ray: Automating Root-Cause Diagnosis of Performance Anomalies in Production Software", Proc. of OSDI 2012. - Fogo Tunde-Onadele(oatundeo)

Cloud Computing & Data Center& Big Data

  1. Shivaram Venkataraman et al., Drizzle: Fast and Adaptable Stream Processing at Scale, Proc. of SOSP 2017 - Weijie Zhou(wzhou9)
  2. Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi et al., Morpheus: Towards Automated SLOs for Enterprise Clusters, Proc. of OSDI 2016. - Zhen Guo(zguo8)
  3. Robert Grandl et al., GRAPHENE: Packing and Dependency-Aware Scheduling for Data-Parallel Clusters, Proc. of OSDI 2016. - Abash Jain(ajain28)
  4. Martín Abadi et al., TensorFlow: A System for Large-Scale Machine Learning, Proc. of OSDI 2016. - Rushikesh Ghatpande(rsghatpa)
  5. Hiep Nguyen, Zhiming Shen, Xiaohui Gu, Sethuraman Subbiah, John Wilkes,"AGILE: elastic distributed resource scaling for Infrastructure-as-a-Service", Proc. of USENIX International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC), San Jose, CA, June, 2013. - Pratik Singh(psingh22) 
  6. Zhiming Shen, Sethuraman Subbiah, Xiaohui Gu, and John Wilkes, CloudScale: Elastic Resource Scaling for Multi-Tenant Cloud Systems, Proc. of ACM SOCC 2011. - Anshul Chandra(achand13) 
  7. Guiseppe DeCandia et al, Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-Value Store, Proc. of SOSP 2007. - Xingyao Huang(xhuang17)
  8. James C. Corbett et al., "Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database", Proc. of OSDI 2012. - Anjali Doneria(adoneria) 

Distributed Systems Security

  1. Andrea Bittau et al., Prochlo: Strong Privacy for Analytics in the Crowd, Proc. of SOSP 2017. 
  2. Rui Shu et al., A Study of Security Vulnerabilities on Docker Hub, Proc. of CODASPY 2017.
  3. Tyler Hunt, Zhiting Zhu, Yuanzhong Xu, Simon Peter, and Emmett Witchel, Ryoan: A Distributed Sandbox for Untrusted Computation on Secret Data , Proc. of OSDI 2016 - Mayur Phadte(mmphadte)
  4. Antonis Papadimitriou et al., Big Data Analytics over Encrypted Datasets with Seabed , Proc. of OSDI 2016.
  5. Yan Zhai et al., CQSTR: Securing Cross-Tenant Applications with Cloud Containers, Proc. of SOCC 2016. - Aniruddh Tambolkar(atambol)
  6. Tsung-Hsuan Ho, Daniel Dean, Xiaohui Gu, William Enck, PREC: Practical Root Exploit Containment for Android Devices, Proc. of CODASPY 2014. - Zhikang Zhang(zzhang63)

Academic Integrity

The university provides a detailed policy on academic integrity. This policy can be found in the Code of Student Conduct. It is understood that when you submit your homework, you are implicitly agreeing to the university honor pledge: "I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this test or assignment."

Academic dishonesty (e.g., cheating or plagiarism) will not be tolerated under any circumstances. If you are having difficultly with any part of the course material, please see me as soon as possible. I will do everything I can to help you with any course-related problems you may be having. If you are found to be guilty of academic dishonesty, however, I will then do everything I can to see that you are punished as forcefully as possible. This may include asking to have you suspended or expelled from the course, the program, and/or the university. At a minimum, you will receive -50% for the assignment in question, and your name will be placed on record with the university as having committed an academic offence. Multiple offences during your academic career will result in suspension or expulsion from the university. I take absolutely no pleasure in pursuing cases of academic misconduct, and would ask that you please do not put me in this position.

Students With Disabilities

All effort will be made to ensure that no students with disabilities are denied any opportunity to successfully complete this course. If you have specific requirements that need to be addressed, please contact me immediately. Possible changes can include (but are not necessarily limited to) rescheduling classes from inaccessible to accessible buildings, or providing access to auxiliary aids such as tape recorders, special lab equipment, or other services such as readers, note takers, or interpreters. This may also include oral or taped tests, readers, scribes, separate testing rooms, or extension of time limits.

Lab Safety Issues

None.

Pass-Through Costs

None.