Guidelines for Case Study Presentations

You may present on any topic having to do with the course material. I have a small preference for presentations about real systems, and how the issues we've discussed in the course play out in the context of those systems, but don't let that dissuade you if you have something else you'd like to present. Remember, the goal is to have you take one thing and explore it in depth.

Here are some places you can explore for possible topics. Please let me know your topic ASAP, since I'll be mining the same list for my lecture material!

• Almost any paper from a recent SOSP or PODC conference, or from the ACM Transactions on Systems. Also many papers from SIGCOMM are relevant.
• Distributed Hash Tables
• The Amazon S3 service
• The Amazon EC2 service
• Hadoop and other map-reduce services
• Version control systems, like cvs, svn, darcs, and git. There are a number of topics here: how are these implemented (client/server vs. distributed)? What constitutes a transaction? How is the virtual file system implemented? What is the patch model?
• Group communication systems
• NECS/TinyOS
• Proto (MIT)
• Stream-Processing Systems, such as Aurora or Gigascope
• TinyDB
• Systems for Grid Programming. There are quite a few such systems; the folks at CMU have a language-based one.
• BitTorrent
• Baltic: Service Combinators for Farming Virtual Machines