Advanced Systems Lab

News

  • 11 Dec 2014 - Milestone 2 submission deadline is on 19.12.2014 at 18:00.
  • 22 Nov 2014 - Guidelines for the report for milestone 2 are now available (link).
  • 21 Nov 2014 - Slides for Tutorial V are now available.
  • 07 Nov 2014 - Milestone 1 submission guidelines (pdf). Deadline 09.11.14 at 23:59.
  • 21 Oct 2014 - Tutorial slides for today's lecture are uploaded.
  • 14 Oct 2014 - SVN repository for each student is set up, and can be accessed at
                                 http://svn.inf.ethz.ch/svn/systems/asl14/trunk/{nethz-username} 
  • 26 Sep 2014 - Upon popular demand, we uploaded the example from the ant tutorial.
  • 24 Sep 2014 - Tutorial slides are uploaded on the course materials web-page (link).
  • 22 Sep 2014 - Student to TA mapping is now available (pdf).

Course Description

This is a project based course operating on a self-study principle. The course relies on the student’s own initiative, aside from a few tutorials to cover the basis of the project and some basic supporting material, there will be no lectures in the conventional sense. The project as well as the course requires that the student complements the material covered in the tutorials with his/her own study as not all relevant and/or needed material will be covered. The grading will be based on the project; there is no exam.

The main goal of this course is to learn how to evaluate the performance of complex computer and software systems. The course offers an opportunity to bring together the knowledge and expertise acquired in different areas (networking, databases, systems programming, parallel programming) by allowing students to build a multi-tier, distributed information system. The course focuses less on system design and development and more on the evaluation and modeling of the system: understanding the behavior, modeling its performance, code instrumentation, bottleneck detection, performance optimizations, as well as analytical and statistical modeling. The ability to explain the behavior of the system plays a bigger role in the grading than the actual building of the system. However, we expect designs and code that have been thought through – major design mistakes and bad coding practices will affect the grade.

Course Organization

  • The following document explains in detail the course and the project organization: 
    ASL-2014 (pdf)
  • Assignment of students to TAs: student-TA(pdf)

Course Materials

 
Course Hours

Tutorials: Tuesday, 17:15 – 19:00, CAB G 61.

Office hours: Thursday 17:15 – 19:00, (with the corresponding assistant)

Project: (2 milestones): during the semester


Lecturer

Gustavo Alonso

TAs: