COURSE OVERVIEW
Ultra-large-scale systems (e.g., Amazon.com and Google’s GMail) pose new challenges for software engineers and operators. These systems require near-perfect up-time while supporting millions of concurrent connections and operations. Failures and errors in such systems may bring financial and reputational repercussions. It is of great interest to learn how to effectively and efficiently engineer (develop, maintain and operate) such ultra-large-scale systems.

COURSE OBJECTIVES
This seminar course explores leading research in the engineering of ultra-large-scale systems, discusses challenges associated with developing, maintaining and operating such systems, highlights industrial engineering practice, and outlines future research directions. Students will acquire the advance knowledge about the engineering of ultra-large-scale systems in the field. Once completed, students should be able to conduct research in topics related to the engineering of ultra-large-scale systems and will be able to leverage the learnt techniques in other system and software engineering related research or practice.

COURSE SCHEDULE

Classes are held on TBD in 156 Barrie Street.


Each class, students will present and discuss around three papers. A detailed schedule is available here. Each class will cover papers along one of the following themes:

• Performance engineering
• System anomaly and failure detection
• Monitoring of ultra-large-scale systems
• Log engineering
• Debugging ultra-large-scale systems
• Performance and Power
• System configuration

COURSE REQUIREMENTS
Students are expected to have some background in software development and software engineering. Knowledge of ultra-large-scale systems will be beneficial but not expected.

Students will be evaluated using the following breakdown:

1. Classroom participation (10%):
Students are expected to read all papers covered in a week, come to class prepared to discuss their thoughts and take in the classroom discussions.

2. Paper presentation and discussion (20%):
Each paper will be assigned to one student who will act as a presenter and a discussant. The presentation will last 15 mins strict and the discussion will last 15-20 mins. Each student should upload the slides to course account before class.

• Role of presenter: As a presenter you should not simply repeat the paper's content (remember you only have 15 mins), instead you should point out the main important findings of the work. You should highlight any novel contributions, any surprises, and other possible applications of the proposed techniques. You should check the authors' other work related to the presented paper. Finally you should place the work relative other papers covered in the course (especially the papers covered in that particular week).
• Role of discussant: As a discussant, you should take an adversarial position by pointing out weak and controversial positions in the paper. You should present a short rebuttal of the paper. You should come prepared with problems and counterexamples for the presented work.

• one slide that lists the main contributions of the paper.
• one slide that places the paper relative to any recent work done by the authors of the paper.
• one slide that links places the paper relative to other papers presented that week.
• as the final slide, a listing of at least three technical points that you liked and three areas that should be improved.