About this course: Cloud computing systems today, whether open-source or used inside companies, are built using a common set of core techniques, algorithms, and design philosophies – all centered around distributed systems. Learn about such fundamental distributed computing "concepts" for cloud computing. Some of these concepts include: clouds, MapReduce, key-value/NoSQL stores, classical distributed algorithms, widely-used distributed algorithms, scalability, trending areas, and much, much more! Know how these systems work from the inside out. Get your hands dirty using these concepts with provided homework exercises. In the programming assignments, implement some of these concepts in template code (programs) provided in the C++ programming language. Prior experience with C++ is required. The course also features interviews with leading researchers and managers, from both industry and academia. This course builds on the material covered in the Cloud Computing Concepts, Part 1 course.
Who is this class for: Who this class is for: This course is intended for students with similar backgrounds as junior or senior undergraduates in computer science. This course will teach you basic algorithmic and design concepts for distributed systems, as used in today’s cloud systems. Much of the course, including quizzes, is conceptual and not programming oriented. The programming assignment assumes some knowledge of C++ (if you have only Java experience, you should be able to pick up C++ quickly may suffice), and allow you to write distributed algorithms in an emulated distributed system on your own machine. To ensure you have the necessary prerequisites, you need to take the prerequisite quiz and achieve a high passing score (at least 90%, preferably 100%). Based on prior student experiences, the Linux/Unix environment may work better for the programming assignments than Windows. Who this class is NOT for: This course is NOT intended for those: (1) wishing to get a high level overview of cloud computing (you can use Wikipedia for that); (2) wishing to do detailed programming in a real cloud (the Cloud Capstone and Cloud Applications MOOCs provide you that); (3) who are averse to theoretical and algorithmic concepts; (4) with little or no prior programming experience in C++ or Java; (5) who expect to see industry-quality code in programming assignments (these are play programming assignments focused on allowing you to implement concepts you learn from lectures, and are not intended for immediate deployment); (6) those not familiar with setting up IDEs/compilers, etc., especially for C++; or (7) those who want to rush through lectures and/or videos and attempt quizzes in haste (quizzes are hard, so make sure you view lectures completely and comprehensively before attempting quizzes).
Taught by: Indranil Gupta, Professor
Department of Computer Science
| Basic Info | Course 2 of 6 in the Cloud Computing Specialization |
| Commitment | 5 weeks of study, 5 - 10 hours/week |
| Language | English |
| How To Pass | Pass all graded assignments to complete the course. |
| User Ratings |
- Reading: Orientation Overview
- Reading: Syllabus
- Reading: About the Discussion Forums
- Practice Quiz: Orientation Quiz
- Video: Orientation Towards Cloud Computing Concepts: Some Basic Computer Science Fundamentals
- Discussion Prompt: Getting to Know Your Classmates
- Reading: Course Learning Community and Social Media
- Reading: Week 1 Overview
- Video: Week 1 Introduction
- Video: 1.1. The Election Problem
- Video: 1.2. Ring Leader Election
- Video: 1.3. Election in Chubby and ZooKeeper
- Video: 1.4. Bully Algorithm
- Video: 2.1. Introduction and Basics
- Video: 2.2. Distributed Mutual Exclusion
- Video: 2.3. Ricart-Agrawala's Algorithm
- Video: 2.4. Maekawa's Algorithm and Wrap-Up
- Reading: Homework 1 Instructions
- Discussion Prompt: Homework 1 Discussion
- Reading: Programming Assignment Instructions
- Reading: Week 2 Overview
- Video: 1.1. RPCs
- Video: 1.2. Transactions
- Video: 1.3. Serial Equivalence
- Video: 1.4. Pessimistic Concurrency
- Video: 1.5. Optimistic Concurrency Control
- Video: 2.1. Replication
- Video: 2.2. Two-Phase Commit
- Reading: Homework 2 Instructions
- Discussion Prompt: Homework 2 Discussion
- Reading: Week 3 Overview
- Video: Stream Processing in Storm
- Video: Distributed Graph Processing
- Video: Structure of Networks
- Video: 4.1. Single-processor Scheduling
- Video: 4.2. Hadoop Scheduling
- Video: 4.3. Dominant-Resource Fair Scheduling
- Video: Storm Demo
- Video: Apache Spark by Faria Kalim
- Reading: Homework 3 Instructions
- Discussion Prompt: Homework 3 Discussion
- Reading: Week 4 Overview
- Video: 1.1. File System Abstraction
- Video: 1.2. NFS and AFS
- Video: Distributed Shared Memory
- Video: Sensor and Their Networks
- Video: Interview with Brighten Godfrey
- Reading: Homework 4 Instructions
- Discussion Prompt: Homework 4 Discussion
- Reading: Week 5 Overview
- Video: 1.1. Basic Security Concepts
- Video: 1.2. Basic Cryptography Concepts
- Video: 1.3. Implementing Mechanism using Cryptography
- Video: 2.1. What Causes Disasters?
- Video: 2.2. AWS Outage
- Video: 2.3. Facebook Outage
- Video: 2.4. The Planet Outage
- Video: 2.5. Wrap-Up
- Video: Interview with Paul Kwiat
- Reading: Homework 5 Instructions
- Discussion Prompt: Homework 5 Discussion
- Video: Conclusion to Cloud Computing Concepts, Part 2
- Reading: Final Exam Instructions
- Discussion Prompt: Final Exam Discussion
- Discussion Prompt: Final Reflection
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| Purchase Course | |
|---|---|
| Access to course materials | Available |
| Access to graded materials | Available |
| Receive a final grade | Available |
| Earn a shareable Course Certificate | Available |
Great course. Looking forward to completing the whole specialization!
I have really grown to like Indy's presentation style. He manages to give high quality lecture after lecture, with very few exceptions. In this entire class, only a few minutes of AFS presentation seemed like it could be improved.
The programming assignment took a bit more work for me this class, even though it was actually easier. I wished that the differentiation between the MP1 and MP2 styles of calling the EmulNet network was spelled out in the instructions. Lack of an example of how to use the MP2 entrypoints into the API had me trying to implement an entry point (which would require more work than was likely expected).
This course was excellent. As a distributed systems engineer I found it very educational and well designed. I was able to refresh some of the concepts and put my knowledge into a better context. Big thank you to the instructor for creating this wonderful learning material.
VF
Quality material and presentation.
Two problems with the course:
1) There is incredible amount of material covered every week, which is great, on the one hand. On the other hand, it's very hard sometimes to see the forest for the trees. It obviously also limits the depth of the material covered and the understanding thereof.
2) The final programming exercise is lacking in quality - probably the weakest part of this course. There has been obviously a great effort made to prepare this exercise, but the code quality is very poor, not to mention sparse and poor code documentation. The exercise specs are not specific and detailed enough - it took some time guessing about what is actual algorithm is required to implement. I've spent much more time trying to understand the code and the exercise requirements than actual on actual programming. I can imagine how frustrating this experience must be for a novice/unexperienced programmer.
This review is relevant for both parts of C3.