Purdue University · West Lafayette · Spring 2022
Lecture (Section 037): Tue, Thu, 3:00–4:15pm in EE 236
Instructor
Vishal Shrivastav
Assistant Professor
Office: EE 334B
vshriva@purdue.edu
Office Hours
Mon 3–4pm on Zoom
The modern datacenter and the cloud has emerged as the dominant computing platform that powers most of world's consumer online services, financial, military, and scientific application domains. The goal of this course is to introduce students to the design, implementation, and management of modern datacenter and cloud networks, as well as provide them with a proper grounding for research in these areas. Each lecture will cover the presentation and discussion of one seminal paper from the field of datacenter and cloud networks. The course will also provide students with an experience in how to present a research paper, how to critically review a research paper, and how to work on a research project and write a research paper.
All course materials and grades will be posted on Brightspace. We will use Piazza as the discussion forum to post and discuss questions regarding the course.
| 1. | Datacenter Architecture and Topology |
| 2. | Datacenter Routing and Load Balancing |
| 3. | Datacenter Transport |
| 4. | Software-defined Networking |
| 5. | Programmable Data Plane |
| 6. | Multi-tenancy in the Cloud |
| 7. | RDMA inside Datacenter |
| 8. | Resource Disaggregation inside Datacenter |
| 9. | Optics inside Datacenter |
35% — Paper Reviews
Each student is expected to write a 2 to 3 page review of one paper from each of the 9 course topics from the syllabus, thus totaling 9 reviews. The first review will be worth 3% credit while the remaining 8 reviews will be worth 4% credit each. A paper review will typically include the paper summary, its strengths and weaknesses, and any suggestions for improvement. No collaboration is allowed for writing the paper reviews.
10% — Paper Presentations
Each student is expected to present one or more research papers from the syllabus to the class during the semester. For grading we will only consider the student's best presentation.
50% — Research Project
Each student will work on a semester-long research project in a group of at most 3 students. Students can either propose their own project or talk to the instructor for project ideas. Any research project with significant networking component will be acceptable. The final deliverables will include a 12-page paper and a 15-20 min presentation on the project. The overall grading will be broken into three milestones:
5% — Attendance and Participation
Students are free to collaborate with anyone or use any available material online for preparing their presentations and completing their research project. However, unless expressly allowed, students are expected to complete all paper reviews by themselves. A student is considered in violation of the academic honesty policy regardless of whether they are the one "copying" or the one "being copied from".
Punishments for academic dishonesty are severe, including receiving a failing grade in the course or being expelled from the university. By departmental rules, all instances of cheating will be reported to the Dean of Students. On the first instance of cheating, students involved will receive a 0 on the assignment; the second instance of cheating will result in a failing grade in the course.
Use of Copyrighted Materials. All course materials are subject to Purdue's copyright policies. Students must not share, distribute, or post any material on an online web site without checking with the instructor.