Datacenter and Cloud Operating Systems

Catalog description

Most of the large-scale web applications and enterprise applications we use daily rely on datacenters for compute, storage, networking and security, commonly via cloud computing interfaces. There are many research questions around how to use the datacenter as a computing platform to architect the “best” applications, all while datacenter hardware is rapidly evolving. This is a graduate-level seminar on cloud and datacenter operating systems. We will study topics such as serverless computing, kernel bypass operating systems, tiered and far memory systems, hardware accelerators, and disaggregation. The goals of the class are to (1) learn about the challenges surrounding cloud and datacenter systems, (2) practice reading, analyzing, and presenting systems research papers on these topics, and (3) perform a semester-long research project and present findings to the class.