Reading List for 6.897 Cloud Computing (Spring 2011)

This schedule is tentative and subject to change.

Feb 4 2011: Overview & kick-off

So what is a "cloud", anyway? Here are some attempts at definitions. The NIST definition appears to be gaining considerable traction. And a pointer to a blog essay on what Netflix has learned (that posting has a pointer to a previous one on why they moved to AWS)

Agenda: Introduction and overview of seminar topics (Hari). Slides (needs MIT certificate).

Feb 11 2011: Example IaaS/PaaS systems

Agenda (links to essays): CloudCmp (Katrina LaCurts), AWS/Azure/AppEngine overview (Daniel Firestone), Eucalyptus (Jeff Bezanson)

Feb 18 2011: Scalable data storage -- "NOSQL" antecedents

These papers don't quite say it, but the two papers on Dynamo and BigTable, below, led to a number of NOSQL systems, such as HBase, Voldemort, Riak, Scalaris, Cassandra, Tokyo Cabinet, MongoDB, CouchDB, etc. that all started from the premise that "Transactional SQL systems can't scale-out".

Agenda (links to essays): FBPhotos (Jonathan Ledlie -- Nokia), Dynamo (Alexandre Milouchev), BigTable (Garthee Ganeshapillai)

Feb 25 2011: Scalable transactional systems

Not to pass on a challenge, researchers have in fact developed (and continue to develop) techniques to scale SQL. Some examples are Megastore (which actually is built on top of BigTable), Hyder, and Schism, as well as H-Store (which we'll study next week).

Agenda: NOSQL (Mark Yen), Megastore (Adam Mustafa), Hyder & Schism (Carlo Curino)

March 4 2011: Harnessing RAM and Flash Storage (for Better Latency, Throughput, and Power)

Agenda: RAMCloud (Tuan Huynh), HStore (Chenxia Liu), FAWN (Eric Lau)

March 11 2011: Programming frameworks

Agenda: MapReduce recap & MRvDB (Haitao Mao), Dryad/DryadLINQ (Lenin Ravindranath), Pig latin (Arvind Thiagarajan)

March 18 2011: Securing cloud storage

Agenda: HAIL (Alina Oprea and Kevin Bowers -- RSA Labs), Depot (Wissam Jarjoui)

March 25 2011: Spring break!

April 1 2011: Datacenter OS

Agenda: Mesos (Jeffrey Bezanson), DRF (Da Wang), fos (Subha Gollakota),

April 8 2011: Virtualized datacenters

Agenda: Orran Krieger (VMWare) [to be confirmed]

April 15 2011: Cloud security

Agenda: WhatsNew (Charles Wright / Sophia Yuditskaya -- Lincoln Labs), HeyYou (Yod Watanaprakornkul), CryptDB (Raluca Ada Popa)

April 22 2011: Datacenter Networking

Incast (Sari Canelake), DCTCP (Shuo Deng), Onix (Jonathan Perry), CloudCost (David Lam)

April 29 2011: Datacenter routing and transport

Agenda: Portland & VL2 (Hari Balakrishnan), EnergyPropDC (Youngjune Gwon)

May 6 2011: Energy considerations

Agenda: EProp (David Lam), PowerProv (Ben Wheeler), ElectricBill (Ethan Xu)


Other readings (that we unfortunately may not have time for...)