Cloud Computing Course

BU EC500 A1 / CS591 K1

Schedule

Tue, Thu 12:00-2:00pm @ PHO211

Announcements

Links

Click here for current schedule

As part of the class, we will be using and referring to:

Course Outline

The course will combine group reading and discussion of influential publications in cloud computing, some lectures by instructor and by invited speakers, independent review of talks coupled with classroom discussion, and a large project.

For the most part, the course will be flipped, with most of the material independently studied, and then group discussion of the material.

The project will be done by teams of 3 to 5 students working with a mentor; depending on the project an industry leader and/or developer with a relavent project, or a senior graduate student or a postdoc working on a relavent research project. It will exploit the MOC as well as industry clouds (Amazon AWS, Google cloud, Rackspace, ...)

Course will give students:

Instructors

Orran Krieger (okrieg at bu dot edu), Ata Turk (ataturk at bu dot edu), Michael Daitzman (michael.daitzman at vecna dot com), Jason Hennessey (henn at bu dot edu)

Prerequisites

For EC students/grads:

This course assumes students have a strong programming background. Undergrads must have taken EC327 or equivalent and preferably another software course, EC330 or EC440, before taking this course. Graduate students must have taken a rigorous programming class recently, such as EC504 or equivalent (or have major software design experience in industry). If you have questions about the prerequisites, please consult the instructors.

For CS students/grads:

This course assumes students have a strong programming background. Undergrads must have taken CS350 Operating Systems (preferably CS552 as well), CS 460 Database Systems (preferably CS562 as well), and CS 455 Computer Networks (preferably but not must) courses. Graduate students must have taken a rigorous programming class recently, (or have major software design experience). If you have questions about the prerequisites, please consult the instructors.

Workload

Each week we will be covering on average two research papers and one practitioner paper or other teaching material. You will be expected to read, review and discuss. These papers will likely require that you find and read additional material as necessary to ensure your comprehension. Do not underestimate the amount of work this can be. You will be required to submit a written review of the papers prior to class. You will also be expected to actively participate in the in class discussion. Each student is expected to lead one more of the class discussions by summarizing the paper and seeding discussions with questions and observations based on the paper.

Projects

In addition, to the weekly papers, there will be a major project. This will be teams of 3 to 5 students, starting from the course beginning, with a mentor, from industry, senior graduate student, or one of the instructors.

The project is due by the end of the exam week. The project presentations will be given in the form of a final poster and a demo. There will also be demos scheduled throughout the course to demonstrate regular progress.

Currently offered projects are given below. Come back for more details in projects. This list will be updated until Jan 20, 2015.

There will be no final exam.

Grading

Evaluation of project will involve evaluation of demo, poster, code reviews, weekly review of agile progress, and mentor and project partner reviews.

Syllabus

The first two weeks we will do course intro, agile methods, and project pitches from potential mentors, as well as some paper reviews. After that. each week we will cover two papers or talks on cloud computing, one discussion topic on agile development or have an industry speaker about a recent cloud technology, and spend one hour on demos from a subset of the projects. Project teams will be expected to give a demo every second week.