15-440, Fall 2010: Distributed Systems

Latest Announcements

12/06: Office Hours this week: Will be 6-8 pm on Thursday, in Gates 5201. If you would like to meet with someone from the course staff at a different time, email staff-440@cs.cmu.edu
12/01: Hw 2 solutions posted.: See assignments page.
11/30: Sample final posted: See exams page.

Overview

15-440 is an introductory course in distributed systems. The emphasis will be on the techniques for creating functional, usable, and high-performance distributed systems. To make the issues more concrete, the class includes several multi-week projects requiring significant design and implementation.

The goals of this course are twofold: First, for students to gain an understanding of the principles and techniques behind the design of distributed systems, such as locking, concurrency, scheduling, and communication across the network. Second, for students to gain practical experience designing, implementing, and debugging real distributed systems.

The major themes this course will teach include scarcity, scheduling, concurrency and concurrent programming, naming, abstraction and modularity, imperfect communication and other types of failure, protection from accidental and malicious harm, optimism, and the use of instrumentation and monitoring and debugging tools in problem solving. As the creation and management of software systems is a fundamental goal of any undergraduate systems course, students will design, implement, and debug large programming projects.

Evaluation is based on homework assignments, the projects, and three exams.

Instructor: David Andersen
Lecture time: Tues/Thurs 10:30 - 11:50, BH 136A
Recitations: TBA
Units: 12

Course Staff

Teaching Assistants

Name	Email
Alex Katkova	staff-440 AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu
Jonathan Harbuck	staff-440 AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu
Dan Lagrotta	staff-440 AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu

Instructor

Name	Email	Office	Tel	Hours
David Andersen	dga AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu	GHC 9109	268-3064	Monday 3-4pm

Course Secretary

Angela Miller, amiller AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu, GHC 9118, Tel: 412-268-6645

Office Hours

Day	Time	Location
Monday-Thursday	4:30-6:30 pm	Gates 5201
Sunday (upon request)	7:00-9:00 pm	Gates 5201

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).

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.
Two free points are needed to extend the deadline of Projects I or II 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.

Recordings

The course staff in 15-440 strongly encourage participation and asking questions during lectures (and definitely during recitations). Therefore, to protect the privacy of your fellow students, no audio or video recordings may be made of the class without the prior permission of the instructor. If the course staff make audio or video recordings of the course, we will notify the course before such recordings are made (and will make it extremely obvious because there will be a big camera in the back of the room...).

Partner Problems

Please try to avoid having partner problems. Seriously! Share your hopes before they turn into concerns, your concerns before they have problems, and your problems before they inflate into crises.

Also, in order for the course staff to help you and your partner work through issues, or for us to provide an appropriate response to serious partner problems, you must contact us well before the relevant due date! While some problems can never be truly solved, it is likely that your career after CMU will you to sometimes "involve management" to address issues with co-workers, and will certainly require you to work out all sorts of problems with your co-workers. If you find yourself in a situation which you can't resolve, it will provide you with an opportunity to practice interacting with management.

A special case to avoid is coming to us a day or two before a major deadline to tell us that your partner has been ill (etc.) for multiple weeks. We, and thus you, have many more options if you inform us while a problem is developing, instead of after the fact.

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.