CS199-6 Wide Area Application Design, Deployment, and Management

• CS199-6, 2-credit P/NP, CCN: 26863
• Time: Wed 5:00-6:30pm
• Room: 310 Soda

• Project presentations and write-ups
• Course schedule
• Lecture notes
• Assignments
• Reading List
• Project Ideas
• Project Teams
• February status report template [ppt] [pdf]
• Grading Policy
• Roster
• AIM
• Mailing List (Archive)

Course Description

PlanetLab is an open, shared planetary-scale application testbed seeded by Intel Research. It is an evolving infrastructure which currently spans 102 computing nodes at 42 sites around the globe. The purpose of PlanetLab is to provide a deployment environment for planetary-scale applications: content-distribution networks, peer-to-peer systems, global file systems, mobility support, distributed network measurement, and others.

Students will form teams to build PlanetLab services and applications. The exact applications and services will be determined by the instructors with input from students during the first two weeks of the course. Some possibilities are:

• File-sharing, messaging, and other collaboration applications
• Anonymizing overlay networks
• Application and Infrastructure monitoring
• Graphical visualization of monitoring data
• Fault inference from management information
• Application deployment and control services
• Service discovery and rendezvous services
• Performance measurement and instrumentation

Students will be able to receive 2 units of 199 credit with Professor David E. Culler. The course will meet 2 times a week for the first 2 weeks, and once a week afterwards. Each team will be expected to give an in-class presentation on the design of their system. Each student will also be responsible for completing some small programming assignments at the beginning of the term.

The course is limited to 15 students and is open to undergraduates only. Prerequisites include CS162 or CS169, as well as programming skills in some of C, C++, Java, Python, and Prolog.