ECE598 Modern Cloud Infrastructure
This course explores the intersection of computer networking, operating systems (OS), and computer architecture in the context of modern datacenters enabling cloud computing. Reasoning about the end-to-end application performance in these environments requires understanding a complex interplay between network protocols, OS stacks, and datacenter hardware architecture. The course offers a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art techniques and technologies used in these three often independently studied domains and how they interact with each other.
The goal of this course is to provide breadth across a wide-range of topics within each domain, rather than going deep into a particular topic/domain. Each lecture will involve active discussion of two or more recently published papers (in systems/networking conferences like SIGCOMM, NSDI, OSDI, SOSP, etc), some of which may also describe how infrastructure is currently deployed in large-scale cloud providers. Students will gain experience reading, reviewing and presenting these papers, alongside executing an independent research project as part of the course. See course logistics.
Topics covered include datacenter network design (e.g., network topologies and transport protocols), programmable and hardware-offloaded networks, optical networks, network designs for ML; OS components like network and storage stacks, CPU schedulers, and memory management; and hardware architecture of processors, memory, peripherals (SSDs, GPUs, FPGAs, SmartNICs, etc) and interconnects (PCIe, CXL, etc). See lecture schedule.
Lectures
- Timing: 12:30-1:50pm Tuesday and Thursday
- Location: 2015 ECEB map
- Instructor: Saksham Agarwal
- Office Hours: 1:00pm Friday, CSL 259 map
Announcements
- Jan 20, 2025: Course website is up!