Designing High-Performance Network Systems

Catalog description

How can we understand the performance of network systems and make them faster? To explore this question, we will break it down into pieces, including (i) how to define and measure a system’s performance, (ii) how to determine what factors in the system’s design affect its performance, and (iii) how to use this information to make the system faster. Through lectures, labs, readings, and hands-on programming projects, we will explore topics including throughput-latency curves, tradeoffs between open and closed request generation, and concurrency. Hands-on projects will involve modern Linux technologies such as perf and io_uring, as well as modern microservice architecture tools such as Kubernetes and distributed tracing frameworks. The class will consist of lectures, short homework assignments that reinforce lecture content, and 4 project assignments with programming and technical writing components that explore these topics in greater detail.