Reading Schedule for CS85

The papers listed below should be read prior to the class meeting for which they are assigned, and your reaction notes should be posted to Edventure by 8:00am on the morning of class.

You can view most postscript files (and gziped postscript files) using gv on our system: 

% gv file.ps.gz
gv cannot handle some version of postscript, in this case you should save a copy of the paper.ps.gz file, gunzip it, and then either view it using gs or convert it to pdf and view it using acroread: 
% gunzip file.ps.gz
% gs file.ps
% ps2pdf file.ps
% acroread file.pdf
You can print postscript using lpr, or print 2-up postscript files using mpage and lpr: 
% lpr file.ps
% mpage -2 -M-10 -dp file.ps | lpr
You can view (and print) pdf files using acroread: 
% acroread file.pdf

Reaction Notes

Reaction notes should not be a summary of the paper, but should reflect a critical reading of the paper. Some questions to think about as you read (your reaction notes do not need to answer every one of these): Did the authors do what they said they were going to do? What are the important ideas (just because an author says something is important doesn't mean it necessarily is)? Do their results make sense? Are their methods sound? Are there weaknesses in their solution? What assumptions are they making? How does their work fit in with other similar work? What improvements and/or extensions to the area do they contribute? Are there terms, ideas, techniques, that you don't understand?

See the Additional Cluster and Distributed Computing Papers link off the CS85 page for many additional related papers)

    Week 1

      For Thursday, Distributed Systems Overview:

  1. Intro to distributed Systems (handed out in class on Tuesday)

    focus on identifying big themes and issues, and on definitions of distributed systems

    Week 2

      For Tuesday, Network Communication:

  2. Overview of Network Communication (handout from class on Thurs)
  3. The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Procotols David D. Clark, Proceedings of the 1988 SIGCOMM Symposium, pp 106-114, Stanford, CA, August 1988.

    You should post reaction notes to paper #3 before 8am Tuesday morning, and read other student's reaction notes before class meets.

      For Thursday, Cluster Overview:

  4. Cluster Computing at a Glance by Mark Baker and Rajkumar Buyya,
    High Performance Cluster Computing, Volume 1, Chapter 1, Prentice Hall, 1999.

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Thursday morning.

    Week 3

      For Tuesday, Message Passing:

  5. The PVM Concurrent Computing System: Evolution, Experiences, and Trends, V. S. Sunderam, G. A. Geist, J. Dongarra, R. Manchek, ACM Journal of Parallel Computing, vol. 20 no. 4, 1994
  6. A message passing standard for MPP and workstations J. J. Dongarra, S. W. Otto, M. Snir, and D. Walker, CACM, 39(7), 1996, pp. 84-90

    To get an idea of what the PVM user interface looks like, you may want to take a quick look at chapt. 5 from the PVM user's guide:
    Chapt. 5 from "A Users' Guide to PVM Parallel Virtual Machine" A. Beguelin, J. J. Dongarra, G. A. Geist, R. Manchek, and V. S. Sunderam, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ORNL/TM-12187, September, 1994

    Post your reaction notes to papers 5 and 6 before 8am Tuesday morning. Think about comparing the two.

      For Thursday, RPC

  7. Implementing remote procedure calls Andrew D. Birrel and Bruce Jay Nelson, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 2(1):39-59, February 1984.

    Here is a local copy of the paper if you can't access it off of ACM's site: local copy of paper

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Thursday morning.

    Week 4: Time, Event Ordering, and Agreement

      For Tuesday: Time

  8. Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system Leslie Lamport, Communications of the ACM, 21(7):558-565, July 1978.

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Tues morning.

      For Thursday: Agreement

  9. The Byzantine Generals Problems, Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease, ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, Vol 4, No. 3, July 1982

    Focus on sections 1-3, just skim 4 and 6, and you can skip 5 if you'd like. Post your reaction notes before 8am Thursday morning.

    Week 5

      For Tuesday: Distributed State

  10. Distributed snapshots: determining global states of distributed systems , K. Mani Chandy and Leslie Lamport; ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 3, 1 (Feb. 1985), Pages 63 - 75

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Tues morning.
    Presentation by George

      For Thursday: Naming

  11. Development of the Domain Name System, Paul V. Mockapetris, Kevin J. Dunlap, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, Volume 25 Issue 1 January 1995

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Thurs morning.
    Presentation by Dan

    Week 6

      For Tuesday: Distributed Shared Memory

  12. Memory Coherence in Shared Virtual Memory Systems K. Li and P. Hudak. ACM Trans. Computer Systems Vol. 7, No. 4. Nov. 1989. pp. 321-359.

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Tues morning.

      For Thursday: Load Balancing

  13. Condor - A Hunter of Idle Workstations" Michael Litzkow, Miron Livny, and Matt Mutka, Proceedings of the 8th International Conference of Distributed Computing Systems, pages 104-111, June, 1988

    just skim through this one to get an idea of where this project is today:

    Distributed Computing in Practice: The Condor Experience, Douglas Thain, Todd Tannenbaum, and Miron Livny, Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, Vol. 17, No. 2-4, pages 323-356, February-April, 2005.

    Post your reaction notes to paper 13 before 8am Thurs morning.

    Week 7

      For Tuesday: Scheduling

  14. A closer look at coscheduling approaches for a network of workstations, Shailabh Nagar, Ajit Banerjee, Anand Sivasubramaniam and Chita R. Das, Proceedings of the eleventh annual ACM symposium on Parallel algorithms and architectures , 1999, Pages 96 - 105

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Tues morning.

      For Thursday: No Reading

    In-class project proposal presentations

    Week 8

      For Tuesday: Fault Tolerance

  15. Replicated Distributed Program, E. C. Cooper, Proceedings of ACM 10th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), Orcas Island, WA, December 1985 pp. 63-78.

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Tues morning.
    Presentation by Alan

      For Thursday: Fault Tolerance

  16. Scalable fault-tolerant distributed shared memory, Florin Sultan, Liviu Iftode, Thu Nguyen, Proceedings of the 2000 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing, 2000

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Thurs morning.
    Presentation by Ken

    Week 9

      For Tuesday: Authentication

  17. "Kerberos: an Authentication Service for Computer Networks", B. Clifford Neuman and Theodore Ts'o, IEEE Communications, 32(9):33-39, September 1994.

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Thurs morning.

      For Thursday: Security

  18. "Encryption and Secure Computer Networks" Gerald J. Popek, Charles S. Kline, Computing Surveys, 11 4, December 1979, pp. 331-356.

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Tues morning.
    Presentation by Alex

    Week 10

      For Tuesday: Cluster Computing

  19. Scalable Cluster Computing with MOSIX for Linux Barak, La'adan, Shiloh, Proc. Linux Expo '99, pp. 95-100, Raleigh, N.C., May 1999.

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Tues morning.
    Presentation by Michael

      For Thursday: Meta-computing

  20. Grids, the TeraGrid, and Beyond, Daniel Reed, IEEE Computer, January 2003 (Vol. 36, No. 1)

  21. Grid Services for Distributed System Integration, I. Foster, C. Kesselman, J.M. Nick, S. Tuecke, IEEE Computer, Volume 35, Issue 6, June 2002 pp.37 - 46

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Thurs morning.

    Week 11

      For Tuesday: Peer-to-Peer Systems

  22. Peer-to-peer: Making gnutella-like P2P systems scalable Yatin Chawathe, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Lee Breslau, Nick Lanham, Scott Shenker, Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications, August 2003

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Tues morning.
    Presentation by Javier

      For Thursday: Distributed File Systems

  23. "Spritely NFS: experiments with cache-consistency protocols", V. Srinivasan and J. Mogul, Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM symposium on Operating Systems Principles, December 3 - 6, 1989, Litchfield Pk., AZ USA

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Tues morning.

    Week 12

      For Tuesday: Distributed File Systems

  24. The Google File System, Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, Shun-Tak Leung, Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, olton Landing, NY, 2003

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Thurs morning.

      For Thursday:

    no paper, project progress reports

    Week 13

      For Tuesday: Security

  25. The Internet Worm: Crisis and Aftermath, Eugene H. Spafford, Communications of the ACM, 32 (6): 678-687, June 1989 Post your reaction notes before 8am Thurs morning.

      For Thursday: Distributed Storage

  26. Wide-area cooperative storage with CFS, Frank Dabek, M. Frans Kaashoek, David Karger, Robert Morris, Ion Stoica, Proceedings of the eighteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, Banff, Alberta, Canada, 2001

    Post your reaction notes before 8am Tues morning.