Advanced Systems Lab

Announcements:

• 23/02: To see your exam papers, you can come to CAB F78 during following hours:
  • Wednesday, 29 February: 9:30 – 12:00
  • Friday, 2 March: 14:00 – 17:00

Course Description

The goal of this course is to teach students how to evaluate the performance of complex computer and software systems. Accordingly, the methodology to carry out experiments and measurements is studied.  Furthermore, the modeling of systems with the help of queueing network systems is explained.

The course will have lectures and project work. The first lecture will be on September 20.

Organization

•  Group assignments
  
• The names of the students who plan to take this course have to be in this list and within a group. If your name is missing or you want to change your group, send an email to Tahmineh.
•  Mailing-List subscription
  
• All the students need to be subscribed to the ASL-Students mailing list. Otherwise they will miss all the notifications!
• Subversion repository (SVN)
• For the submission of the milestones, every group gets a directory in the Subversion repository for this course.
• The URL of your group directory looks as follows:
  https://svn.inf.ethz.ch/svn/systems/asl11/trunk/{your class}/{your group}
  E.g. for group 4 in class 3 this would look like this
  https://svn.inf.ethz.ch/svn/systems/asl11/trunk/class3/group4
• For authorization, your will need your nethz login.
  - If you do not have a nethz login, please send your solution via email to your assigned assistant.
  - If you have an nethz login, but your SVN access does not work, please send an email to Lukas containing your nethz ID, your class and group and a short description of the problem.
• Cluster Info and Guidelines
• The server machines are ikr<number>.ethz.ch where <number> is one of the following:
     01 02 03 -  05 -  07 -  09
  10 11 -  13 14 15 16 17 - 19
  20 21 -  23 24 25 26 27 28 29
  30 31
  (The missing servers are broken and can not be used.)
• You can login with your nethz login using SSH.
• If you want to run real experiments, do NOT use /home/<username>/. This is an NFS export and therefore access to these files is not as fast as using a local disk.
  You should create a directory like this /local/asl11/<username>/
• Use OpenJDK 1.6
• The servers are restarted every day at 07:00 AM.
• The usage guidelines for the reservation system are ClusterReservationGuidelinesV2.txt. The reservation system is in effect from Nov 10th 2011, 00:00.

Lecture Slides

Project

Literature

Jain: The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis, Wiley.

Material and exercises from these chapters will be one of the sources for questions in the exam; the other two sources are the lecture (slides and what was presented in the lecture) as well as the milestones and project developed during the course. We highly recommend to read the other chapters of the book even if they are not listed here.

Chapters 1, 2, 3 = general introduction, common terminology
Chapters 4, 5, 6 = workloads
Chapter 10 = data presentation
Chapters 12, 13, 14 = probability and statistics
Chapters 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22 = experiment design
Chapters 30, 31, 32, 33, 36 = queuing theory

We do not expect you to memorize the expressions of, e.g., queuing theory models. We expect you, however, to be able to derive the basic ones for the simple queuing models (M/M/1, M/M/m, M/M/1/B, etc.) and to be able to work with the different laws to solve modeling problems. Note that queuing networks is included in the material (as they are needed for milestone 3).

Week 1  reading assignment:

• Jain, Chapter 11 (Ratio Games)
• Gelman and Nolan, Teaching Statistics, Chapter 10
  

 Week 4  reading assignment:

• TPC-C benchmark report executive summary

• TPC-C benchmark report full disclosure document

Exam

The following exercises are taken from the textbook and are indicative of some of the questions you can expect to get in the exam. This list is intended only as an example and to help you prepare for the exam by pointing to important topics that you need to know well. Note that this list does not exclude the possibility of having questions about topics that are not mentioned in this list. The format and style of the question might also deviate from the exercises in this list.

1.1
2.2 (use the system you build in milestone 1 as example)
12.1, 12.7
13.2, 14.2
14.3
16.1
17.1
18.1
30.3, 30.4
31.1, 31.2, 31.3, 31.4 31.7, 31.8
32.1
33.1, 33.2, 33.3, 33.5, 33.6, 33.7

Course Hours

Lecture

Tue, 17-19h, room CAB G 61

Exercise

Thu, 17−19h, room CHN D 42, Tahmineh Sanamrad

       17−19h, room CHN D 46, Tudor-Ioan Salomie

       17−19h, room CHN D 48, Ioana Giurgiu

       17−19h, room CAB G 52, Lukas Blunschi

       17−19h, room CAB G 56, Jana Giceva

Lecturers

Teaching Assistants

Ioana Giurgiu