CS 597C: Scalable Internet Services
Course Description
The goal of this graduate seminar is to explore
systems for and applications of an interesting model of distributed
communication and coordination over the Internet, namely the publish-subscribe
model. The seminar will serve as a
vehicle for us to research, understand, and make various design decisions at
the protocols, systems and applications levels for this model. As such, the seminar will be quite
exploratory and research-oriented, with the goal being to learn a lot together
and to have fun doing so.
Publish-subscribe is a model of asynchronous,
decoupled communication that holds great promise for a variety of highly
distributed applications, ranging from coordinating distributed computations
among powerful nodes, through supporting a new model of selective dissemination
of information for human users, to coordinating and monitoring extremely large
networks of extremely small sensors.
Larger scales and greater distribution require decoupling of producers
and communications rather than traditional client-server approaches, long
latencies and the human as well as bandwidth inefficiencies of polling demand
asynchronous rather than synchronous communication, and human as well as
network bandwidth considerations demand sophisticated selection and filtering of
the information that is desired.
Publish-subscribe has been used within local-area networks for
integrating back-end applications together, but the scale, popularity and
openness of the Internet---as well as the processing limitations of human
users---demand whole new approaches.
This graduate seminar
will explore the publish-subscribe model over the Internet. Our exploration will assume Internet
transport (TCP/IP) and will divide the publish-subscribe stack above it into
three layers: the communication layer, the protocol layer, and the application
layer. Within these layers, we will
explore in depth the five major topics listed below.
1. Application
Protocols
2. PubSub
Interfaces and Protocol Specifications
3. Distributed
PubSub System Design
4. Matching
Algorithms and Systems (Centralized and Distributed)
5. PubSub
Applications (including use of PubSub in Traditional Applications)
Depending
on how many people join the seminar, we plan to divide people into teams that
would be responsible for different topics among the five throughout the course.
That is, all topics will be carried forward as threads throughout the term,
instead of being dealt with sequentially, so that we can examine the individual
topics in depth and also the synergies and interfaces among them. Teams will read some assigned papers as well
as perform independent research on the Web, in order to understand the key
issues and approaches in their assigned topic area and its sub-topics. They
will synthesize the information and present it to the class. Teams may also do projects in their topic
areas. Class sessions will include
presentations by different teams, both on specific subtopics and also oriented
toward successively “peeling the onion” for their assigned topics over the
semester, driving from research to design; i.e. starting with identifying the
key issues in the topic, then determining the major contenders for alternative
approaches, then analyzing the tradeoffs among some of the top candidates, then
determining which one they would choose and why. Class sessions will also include presentations by guest speakers
who are experts in specific areas, presentations by me, and a lot of discussion. Students will therefore be responsible for
deep investigation into their teams’ topics or layers, but will learn a lot
about the others as well. Interested
students and teams may perform small projects as well to learn by doing and to help sharpen their
understanding.