 |
 |
 |
DIVISION OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
CS 260r. Special Topics
in Computer Systems:
|
|
|
|
| News |
Final paper guidelines - Papers due January 8, 2007
Project ideas and proposal information - Proposals due October 27
Assignment #1 posted - Due November 16, 2006
| Course Description |
Instructor: Prof. Matt Welsh
Office Hours: Thursdays 10-12, Maxwell Dworkin 233
Teaching Fellow: Ian Rose
Prerequisites: All graduate students are welcome to register. Undergraduates must have previously taken CS143, CS161, or CS165.
CS260r is a new graduate seminar course discussing topics from the research literature in operating systems, distributed systems, and networking. The topic of the course will rotate from year to year and will focus on a specific area of interest to the instructor. The goal of CS260r is to discuss "hot topics" in computer systems, giving the instructor and students the opportunity to delve into a focused research area. It is expected that CS260r will be offered every other year on average with the instructor rotating among Seltzer, Welsh, Roussopoulos, and Nagpal, as well as visiting faculty in the systems area.
The topic for CS260r for Fall 2006 is Internet scale sensor networking. The convergence of embedded sensors and pervasive high-performance networking is giving rise to a new class of distributed applications, which we refer to as Internet-scale sensing (ISS). An Internet-scale sensing system consists of a number of geographically distributed data sources tied into a networked framework for collecting, filtering, and processing potentially large volumes of real-time data. Data sources include telescopes, satellites, seismometers, or weather stations; corresponding scientific applications include whole-sky surveys, automated pulsar detection, earthquake detection and characterization (e.g., the NSF EarthScope project), and environmental monitoring of large ecosystems.
In the distributed systems community, ISS systems are being developed to support network performance monitoring, and distributed virus and worm detection. The common theme across these systems is the acquisition and processing of real-time data, yielding a macroscopic view of many disparate data sources. This is a new area of research and one that draws on many fields for inspiration.
This course will survey the area of Internet-Scale sensor networking with readings cutting across distributed systems, databases, sensor networks, and various application domains. Students will read 2-3 research papers a week and write short summaries of each paper. Several short homework assignments will provide hands-on experience with design and implementation of an ISS system. Finally, students will undertake a significant research project related to the topic of the course, working in groups of 2-3 students. At the end of the term, students will present projects in class and prepare a written project report.
This course is intended for graduate students at all levels as well as advanced undergraduates who have taken CS143, CS161, or CS165.
| Assignments |
This course will involve paper readings, a couple of homework assignments, and a research project. You are expected to read the papers for each lecture, and send a short(!) summary -- 3 or 4 bullet items at the most -- of each paper to the course e-mail address before the lecture. (Send these as a single email with the current lecture date in the subject line, to cs260r-reviews@eecs.)
Finally, you will undertake a significant research project during the term. The goal is to design, implement, and evaluate a real system and write a report that could eventually lead to publication. At the end of the course we will have project presentations where each group gives a short talk on their work. You may be able to combine your project with another graduate course, subject to approval by the instructors.
| Syllabus and Schedule |
Note: This syllabus is tentative and is subject to change. Please check it frequently for updates.
| Date | Topic | Readings |
| Tu 9/19/06 | Course Intro - Click here for slides | No reading |
| Th 9/21/06 | Visions | IrisNet, SensorWeb |
| Tu 9/26/06 | Visions | HIFI (CIDR'05), As We May Think, Vannevar Bush (essential reading!) |
| Th 9/28/06 | Guest Lecture: Jim Kurose, UMass Amherst
(slides) Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) |
Weather detection sensor network |
| Tu 10/3/06 | Aurora | Aurora (VLDB'02) |
| Th 10/5/06 | Aurora and Aurora* | Aurora and Aurora* (CIDR'03) |
| Tu 10/10/06 | PIER | PIER (VLDB'03) (read FIRST!), PIER (CIDR'05) (skim) |
| Th 10/12/06 | Borealis | Borealis (CIDR'05) |
| Tu 10/17/06 | Guest Lecture - Jim Waldo, Sun Microsystems The Neuromancer Project |
A Note on Distributed Computing |
| Th 10/19/06 | Availability and Fault Tolerance | Fault Tolerance in Borealis (SIGMOD'05), Towards a dependable architecture for Internet-scale sensing |
| Tu 10/24/06 | IrisNet | IrisNet (tech report 2003) |
| Th 10/26/06 | Load Balancing
Research project proposals due Friday 5pm |
Dynamic load distribution |
| Tu 10/31/06 | Querying Sensor Networks | TinyDB (SIGMOD'03), Beyond Average (IPSN'03) |
| Th 11/2/06 | No class | |
| Tu 11/7/06 | No class | |
| Th 11/9/06 | No class | |
| Tu 11/14/06 | Internet Measurement | Sound Internet Measurement (IMC'04), ScriptRoute (USITS'03) |
| Th 11/16/06 | Internet Measurement | Attack Detection (read carefully), Reconstructing an Internet-Scale Event (skim) |
| Tu 11/21/06 | Guest lecture - Ugur Cetintemel, Brown University
Research project updates due |
8 requirements of real-time stream processing |
| Th 11/23/06 | Holiday - Thanksgiving | |
| Tu 11/28/06 | Honeypots and Honeyfarms | Potemkin (SOSP'05), NetBait |
| Th 11/30/06 | Guest lecture - Jim Davis, Harvard University
"Sensing Earth Deformation with GPS" |
The Global Positioning System |
| Tu 12/5/06 | Distributed systems monitoring | SDIMS (SIGCOMM'04), Sophia (HotNets'03) |
| Th 12/7/06 | Distributed systems monitoring | Using Queries for Distributed Monitoring and Forensics (EuroSys'06) |
| Tu 12/12/06 | Blogs and RSS Feeds | Corona (NSDI'06), Cobra |
| Th 12/14/06 | Project Presentations | |
| Tu 12/19/06 | Project Presentations | |
| Mo 1/8/07 | Final Project Reports Due |