263-0007-00L Advanced Systems Lab

NEWS: 

The exams can be reviewed in CAB F 74.1
Monday, 28 February 15:00 - 18:00 and
Wednesday, 2 March 15:00 - 18:00

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 21.

Organization

•  Group assignments
  
• Room numbers have been updated!
• 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 the assistants.
•  Mailing-List subscription
  
• Cluster Reservation Interface (accessible through ETH VPN)

Lecture Slides

Project

Literature

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

Exam

Exam Content

Material and exercises from these chapters from the textbook (see Literature) will be one of the sources for questions in the exam:

• 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

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.

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).

Useful Exercises

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

Sample Exam Questions

Course Hours

Lecture

Tue, 17-19h, room CAB G 61

Exercise

Thu, 17−19h, room CHN D 42

     17−19h, room CHN D 46

     17−19h, room CHN D 48

Lecturers