Cloud Computing Architecture

Overview

Cloud computing hosts a wide variety of online services that we use on a daily basis, including web search, social networks, and video streaming. In this course, we study how datacenter hardware, systems software, and applications are designed at large scale for the cloud. The course covers topics including server design, cluster management, large-scale storage systems, serverless computing, data analytics frameworks, and performance analysis.

Learning objectives: After successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

Explain how datacenter hardware and software systems are organized
Analyze the performance, energy efficiency, and availability tradeoffs in the design of cloud systems
Implement cloud applications and evaluate their performance

Lecturers

Professor Gustavo Alonso ()
Professor Ana Klimovic ()

Teaching Assistants

Dan Graur ()
Dario Korolija ()
Dimitris Koutsoukos ()

Lectures

Tuesdays 11:00 - 12:00
Wednesdays 12:00 - 14:00

Exercises

Wednesdays 16:00 - 18:00

Grading

The final grade will be determined by a semester-long project and an end-of-semester exam.

Semester Project (40%)
Deadline to submit group preferences for project: March 12, 2021.
Groups will be assigned on March 15th, 2021. You may then start working on the project.
Project deadline for Part 1 and 2: April 13, 2021
Project deadline for Part 3 and 4: May 21, 2021
End-of-semester Exam (60%)
Exam date: To be confirmed. The exam will be between June 7 and 18th. We will let you know when the date and time is confirmed.

NOTE: If you would like to drop the course, Friday March 12, 2021 is the last day.

Until further notice lectures and tutorials will be online. Announcements, lecture slides and zoom links for the lectures will be handled through moodle.

Reference Material

The following textbooks provide additional material about the topics we will cover in this course:

The Datacenter as a Computer, 3rd edition, by Luiz Barroso, Urs Hölzle, and Partha Ranganathan.
Chapter 6 in Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 6th edition, by John Hennessy and David Patterson.

We will also reference to research papers about particular topics during lectures.