Note: This entire website is still under construction. Anything can change until the beginning of the semester, so check again soon.

Class Overview

Instructors:
* Roxana Geambasu. Office hours by appointment.
* Sambit Sahu. Office hours by appointment.
* Eugene Wu. Office hours by appointment.

TA: TBD. Office hours: TBD

Lectures: Wednesdays, 6-8:30pm, in 413 Kent Hall.

Communications: piazza, staff only: email at their addresses.

An introduction to large-scale distributed systems with an emphasis on big-data processing and storage infrastructures. Topics include fundamental tradeoffs in distributed systems, techniques for exploiting parallelism, big-data computation and storage models, design and implementation of various well-known distributed systems infrastructures, and concrete exposure to programming big-data applications on top popular, open-source infrastructures for data processing and storage systems.

The course is co-taught by Roxana Geambasu (Assistant Prof. in CS), Sambit Sahu (IBM TJ Watson researcher and CS affiliated faculty), and Eugene Wu (Assistant Prof. in CS). Geambasu will teach fundamental concepts of distributed systems, along with the tradeoffs that arise. Sahu will teach various distributed computation models, along with concrete examples of open-source big-data technologies and how they can be programmed. Wu will teach concepts of data modeling, storage, and visualization, along with the tradeoffs they raise.

Grading

The grading formula is:

Prerequisites:

Textbooks

We're recommending the following two reference texts, which cover some of the big-data technologies with which students will be interacting in the course:

  1. Learning Spark. Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (February 27, 2015). Language: English. ISBN-10: 1449358624. ISBN-13: 978-1449358624.

  2. Advanced Analytics with Spark: Patterns for Learning from Data at Scale. Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (April 20, 2015). Language: English. ISBN-10: 1491912766. ISBN-13: 978-1491912768.