Stanford

CS 244C: Distributed System Projects

DRAFT Spring 2005 HANDOUT #1 DRAFT

Instructors: Pei Cao and Peter Danzig

cs244c-spr0405-all At lists dot stanford dot eeeddduuu


Class Meets: Fri 10AM-Noon Room Gates 260.
Peter's office hours: Arrange by email pdanzig At danzigthomas dot cccooommm
Pei's office hours: Arrange by email   cao At theory doT Stanford doT eeedddduuuu

Summary

This course offers students an opportunity to conduct systems projects under the guidance of the instructors.  Each student may propose a project or choose one from a list of projects that we suggest.  The purpose of the course is for students to gain experience building distributed systems or conducting resesearch. 

Students may work individually or in groups of 2.

Schedule and Course Work

There are few formal lectures in this course.  Rather, we gather once a week to go over the projects.  Because ten-weeks is a short time to finish an interesting project, the course is "front-loaded" to ensure that decisions are made early enough to allow sufficient time for coding and experimentation.

Here is a tentative schedule of the course:

Week 1

April 1

Class: Introductions.  Overview of suggested projects. 

Project: Write a 2 page project proposal.  Work with instructor as needed to frame it.

 

Week 2

April 8

Class: Each student gives a 15 minute introduction to their project.  Whiteboard discussion with instructor and classmates.

Project:  Project Design Specification Due

 

Week 3

April 15

Class:  Each student group selects and distributes one relevant paper to be discussed in class next week.

Homework: Select and distribute most relevant paper to read and discuss for next class meeting.

Week 4

April 22

Project Design Specification Due (4-5 Pages plus References).

Class:  Present and discuss project designs.

Project: Begin serious project development

Week 5

April 29

Class: Student present related work,

Week 6

May 5

Class: Student present related work,

Week 7

May 12

Class: Mid-term project presentation

Project: Mid-term project report 3 pages and presentation

 

Week 8

May 19

Class: Student present related work,

Meet weekly with instructor.

Week 9

May 26

Class: Student present related work,

Meet weekly with instructor.

Week 10

June 2

Class: Oral Project Report

Finals

June 9

Project: Written Project Report

 

 

 

Grading

There is no homework or exam in this course. Instead, the following "deliverables" are expected for each project:

  • Project Proposal (1-2 pages) by 4/9;
  • Project Design and Plan (4-5 pages) by 4/23;
  • Mid-term Project Report (2-3 pages) by 5/14;
  • Final Project Report (10-12 pages), together with code and data, by 6/9.

Each report is graded.  In addition, a grade is given on project code and data as well.. 

The final grade is determined by: 10% on project proposal, 20% on project design, 10% on mid-term report, 25% on final project report, and 35% on project code and data. 

Peter’s Project Suggestions

Consider the top 16 problems of the Internet, as documented by K Claffy in her cs244a talk.   Address one of them: such as management of 10,000 network elements.

SPAM-free Internet Server-based anti-SPAM.  Review what’s happening in the IETF and industry and design a SPAM-free email system.

Analyze data that I have and write paper that says web caches don’t work. 

Cable-modem and satellite DVRs like TIVO are destined to consume 1% of US electrical power consumption and cause say 1.5% of US greenhouse gas emissions.   Redesign the distributed system protocols that prevent these devices from entering a low power mode when the TV is off or the DVR is not recording.

DNS analysis of root name server data.

The famous biologist E.O. Wilson argues in a collection of articles, that there’s been plenty of work on genetic databases, but not enough on other types of experimental data.   Read his articles, talk to some local scientists, and prototype Wilson’s vision  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

A bunch of great Internet contributors wrote a position paper of the Internet in 10-15 years http://www.ir.bbn.com/~craig/e2e-vision.pdf.  Investigate one of the trends they propose.

Pei’s Project Suggestions