CS 672: System Reliability at Scale (Spring 2024)

Course Plan (subject to revision)

Week	Date	Assignments	Topic	Reading(s)
1	Jan 16	Survey Assigned (will be on Canvas)	Preview of the syllabus, course objectives and activities.	Required (no reviews): Course Syllabus Recommended: None
1	Jan 18	Survey Due (not graded)	Background on large-scale computing systems.	Required: None Recommended: Barroso, Luiz André, et al., The Datacenter as a Computer: Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines, Chapter 1, Springer Nature, 2019. Huang, Peng, et al., Gray Failure: The Achilles' Heel of Cloud-Scale Systems, HotOS, 2017. Gabriel H., et al., A Research Retrospective on AMD's Exascale Computing Journey, ISCA, 2023. Reed, Daniel, Dennis Gannon, and Jack Dongarra, HPC Forecast: Cloudy and Uncertain", CACM, 2023.
2	Jan 23		Quality of service and availability.	Required: B. Treynor, et al., The Calculus of Service Availability, CACM, 2017. Recommended: H. S. Gunawi, et al., Why Does the Cloud Stop Computing? Lessons from Hundreds of Service Outages, ISOCC, 2016. Mogul, Nines are Not Enough: Meaningful Metrics for Clouds, HotOS, 2019. Dean, Jeffrey, and Luiz André Barroso, The Tail at Scale, CACM, 2013. Bartlett, Wendy and Spainhower, Lisa, Commercial Fault Tolerance: A Tale of Two Systems, IEEE TDSC, 2004.
2	Jan 25	Assignment 1 Released on Canvas	Failures at scale.	Required: B. Maurer, Fail at Scale, CACM, 2015. Recommended: Barroso, Luiz André, et al., The Datacenter as a Computer: Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines, Chapter 7, Springer Nature, 2019.
3	Jan 30		Hardware reliability testing.	Required (Pick your favorite one; the other is recommended): Serebryany, Kostya, et al., SiliFuzz: Fuzzing CPUs by Proxy, arXiv, 2021. Trippel, Timothy, et al., Fuzzing Hardware Like Software, USENIX Security, 2022. Additional Recommended: Vishwanath, Kashi Venkatesh, and Nachiappan Nagappan, Characterizing Cloud Computing Hardware Reliability, SoCC, 2010. Mentioned in Lecture: Invel Corporation, Making of a Chip: Illustrations, 2012.
3	Feb 1		Production testing.	Required (Pick your favorite one; the other is recommended): Sun, Xudong, et al., Testing Configuration Changes in Context to Prevent Production Failures, OSDI, 2020. Dixit, Harish, et al., Detecting Silent Data Corruptions in the Wild, arXiv, 2022.
4	Feb 6		Silent data corruption.	Required: Wang, Shaobu, et al., Understanding Silent Data Corruptions in a Large Production CPU Population, SOSP, 2023. Recommended: Caroline Trippel, Silent Data Corruption at Scale, Computer Architecture Today, 2022.
4	Feb 8	Assignment 1 Due (14:00 on Canvas)	Assignment 1 Discussion	Required: None - no review due today. Recommended: Bacon, David F., Detection and Prevention of Silent Data Corruption in an Exabyte-scale Database System, IEEE Workshop on Silicon Errors in Logic, 2022.
5	Feb 13	Assignment 2 Released on Feb 14	Project Discussion	Recommended Cavage, Mark, There's Just No Getting around It: You're Building a Distributed System, ACM Queue, 2013. Bailis, Peter, and Ali Ghodsi, Eventual Consistency Today: Limitations, Extensions, and Beyond, ACM Queue, 2013.
5	Feb 15		Logical Time in Distributed Systems	Recommended Lamport, Leslie, Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System, CACM, 1978.
6	Feb 20		Fault Tolerance and Commit Consensus	*Required (due Thursday Feb 22* before class):** Scales, Daniel J., Mike Nelson, and Ganesh Venkitachalam, The Design of a Practical System for Fault-Tolerant Virtual Machines, SIGOPS OS Review, 2010. Recommended: F. B. Schneider, Implementing Fault-Tolerant Services using the State Machine Approach: A Tutorial, ACM Computing Surveys, 1990. Alsberg, Peter A., and John D. Day, A Principle for Resilient Sharing of Distributed Resources, ICSE, 1976.
6	Feb 22	Project: Idea Bids Due	No Class Today Project & Assignment Time	Required: Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout, In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm (Extended Version), Technical Report, 2014. Recommended: Lamport, Leslie. Paxos Made Simple, ACM SIGACT News, 2001. Corbett, James C., et al., Spanner: Google's Globally Distributed Database, ACM TOCS, 2013.
7	Feb 27	Assignment 2 Due (Feb 28, 11:59 pm)	Data Consensus; Raft	None
7	Feb 29		Byzantine Fault Tolerance	Required: Castro, Miguel, and Barbara Liskov, Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance, OSDI, 1999. Recommended: Pease, Marshall, Robert Shostak, and Leslie Lamport Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults, JACM, 1980. Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease, The Byzantine Generals Problem, ACM TOPLAS, 1982.
8	Mar 5		Fault Injection	Required: Peter Alvaro, Joshua Rosen, and Joseph M. Hellerstein, Lineage-Driven Fault Injection, SIGMOD, 2015. Recommended: McCaffrey, Caitie, The Verification of a Distributed System, CACM, 2016. [Talk at QCon 2016] Kolton Andrus, Ben Schmaus, Automated Failure Testing, Netflix Technology Blog, 2016. Peter Alvaro and Severine Tymon, Abstracting the Geniuses Away from Failure Testing, ACM Queue, 2017
8	Mar 7	Project: Proposal Report Due	Group Membership	None
-	~~Mar 12~~	Spring Break
-	~~Mar 14~~	Spring Break
9	Mar 19		Resource Disaggregation	Required: Sergey Blagodurov, Mike Ignatowski, and Valentina Salapura, The Time is Ripe for Disaggregated Systems, Computer Architecture Today, 2021. Recommended: Waldo, Jim, et al., A Note on Distributed Computing, International Workshop on Mobile Object Systems, 1996.
9	Mar 21		Resource Disaggregation cntd.	Required: Lim, Kevin, et al., Disaggregated Memory for Expansion and Sharing in Blade Servers, ISCA, 2009. Recommended: Lim, Kevin, et al., System-level Implications of Disaggregated Memory, HPCA, 2012. Christoph Anneser, et al.,Programming Fully Disaggregated Systems, HotOS, 2023.
10	Mar 26		Memory Disaggregation: Technologies	Required: None (readings from last week) Recommended: None
10	Mar 28	Project: Checkpoint 1 Report Due	Memory Disaggregation: Coherence and Consistency	Required: None (readings from last week) Recommended: Sorin, Daniel, Mark Hill, and David Wood, A Primer on Memory Consistency and Cache Coherence, Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture, Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2011. Leslie Lamport, How to Make a Multiprocessor Computer That Correctly Executes Multiprocess Programs, IEEE Transactions on Computers, 1979. Papamarcos and Patel, A Low-Overhead Coherence Solution for Multiprocessors with Private Cache Memories, ISCA, 1984.
11	Apr 2		Disaggregation: Hardware Accelerators	Required: Shan, Yizhou, et al., LegoOS: A Disseminated, Distributed OS for Hardware Resource Disaggregation, OSDI, 2018. Recommended: Anneser, Christoph, et al., Programming Fully Disaggregated Systems, HotOS, 2023.
11	Apr 4		Disaggregation: CXL and Programmability	Required: Stark, Samuel W., et al., How Flexible is CXL's Memory Protection? CACM, 2023. Recommended: Angel, Sebastian, Mihir Nanavati, and Siddhartha Sen, Disaggregation and the Application, HotCloud, 2020. Sharma, Debendra Das, Robert Blankenship, and Daniel S. Berger, An Introduction to the Compute Express Link (CXL) Interconnect, arXiv, 2023.
12	Apr 9		Abstractions and Transparency	Required: None Recommended: None
12	Apr 11	Project: Checkpoint 2 Report Due	Near Data Processing	Required: None Recommended: TBA
13	Apr 16		Course Recap and Reflection	Required: None Recommended: None
13	Apr 18		No Class - Project Time	Required: None Recommended: None
14	Apr 23	Project: Final Presentations	See Canvas for each group's specific date assignment
14	Apr 25	Project: Final Presentations	See Canvas for each group's specific date assignment
-	May 7 @ 11:59 pm	Project: Final Report Due	-	-

Course Plan (subject to revision)

Week

Date

Assignments

Topic

Reading(s)