CS261 Fall 2009: Quiz #3

This exam is closed notes, closed papers, closed everything. Please use whatever word processing software that you'd like to write your answers, but please send me either plain text or PDF. Answers should be emailed to: margo@eecs.harvard.edu.

  1. Distributed Systems (15 points)

    2. The Grapevine system was a fine email solution when email was supported within an organization with a few 10's of sites. However, today, mail is global. You are sitting at dinner during reading period chatting with your (geeky) friends, and one suggests that you can still use all the basic Grapevine mechanisms, and just replace the underlying database/registry with a DHT. What do you say in response?

  2. Posing a Research Question (15 points)

    3. Let's pretend that you are a graduate student and you have to prepare for your qualifying exam. Pose a research question that is suggested to you by one or more of the following papers: You may not select a research question that A) you are actually working on, B) that someone you know is actually working on, or C) that you've heard someone is working on. That is, you must draw on your own knowledge and experience reading papers to identify an interesting question to ask about large scale distributed systems.

    After you state your question, explain which papers prompted you to ask it and why.

  3. MYO (Make-your-own) Exam (15 points)

    4. Write an exam question:

    Drawing on all the papers we've read for the course, pose a question whose answer demonstrates that you can use the papers we've read to explain how some aspect of modern systems research fits into the historical research context (5 points).

    Answer your own question (10 points).