CS199-6 Wide Area Application Design, Deployment, and Management

UC Berkeley, Spring 2003
Instructors: Timothy Roscoe (troscoe@intel-research.net), Brent Chun (bnc@intel-research.net)
Advisor: Professor David E. Culler (culler@cs.berkeley.edu)


Course Description

This is an undergraduate project course aimed at building planetary-scale applications to run over the PlanetLab infrastructure, and/or the tools and services needed to effectively deploy and manage them.

PlanetLab is an open, shared planetary-scale application testbed seeded by Intel Research. It is an evolving infrastructure which currently spans 102 computing nodes at 42 sites around the globe. The purpose of PlanetLab is to provide a deployment environment for planetary-scale applications: content-distribution networks, peer-to-peer systems, global file systems, mobility support, distributed network measurement, and others.

Students will form teams to build PlanetLab services and applications. The exact applications and services will be determined by the instructors with input from students during the first two weeks of the course. Some possibilities are:

The goal of the project is to build something fun and interesting which may become a long-running PlanetLab application or a part of PlanetLab's core architecture.

Students will be able to receive 2 units of 199 credit with Professor David E. Culler. The course will meet 2 times a week for the first 2 weeks, and once a week afterwards. Each team will be expected to give an in-class presentation on the design of their system. Each student will also be responsible for completing some small programming assignments at the beginning of the term.

The course is limited to 15 students and is open to undergraduates only. Prerequisites include CS162 or CS169, as well as programming skills in some of C, C++, Java, Python, and Prolog.


Last Updated: Tue Jan 28 16:13:04 PST 2003