6.033 | Spring 2021 | General Information

6.033 Learning Objectives

After 6.033, the students will be able to design their own distributed systems to solve real-world problems. The ability to design one's own distributed system includes an ability to argue for one's design choices.

This primary objective is supported by a few others:

The students will be able to evaluate and critique existing systems, as well as their own system designs. As part of that, students will learn to recognize design choices made in existing systems.
The students will be able to apply the technical material taught in lecture to new system components. This implies an ability to recognize and describe:
- How common design patterns in computer system—such as abstraction and modularity—are used to limit complexity.
- How operating systems use virtualization and abstraction to enforce modularity.
- How the Internet is designed to deal with scale, a diversity of applications, and competing economic interests.
- How reliable, usable distributed systems are able to be built on top of an unreliable network.
- Common pitfalls in the security of computer systems, and how to combat them.

Because 6.033 is a CI-M class, students will also learn to communicate in forms that are common in the field of computer systems. This includes written design reports, oral presentations, and peer review. The communication instruction also supports the primary learning objective of designing systems. In the real world, we design systems in teams, and communication of many forms (written, oral, etc.) is part of that process.

Prerequisites: 6.004 and 6.009
Units: 5-1-6
Requirements satisfied: CI-M for Course 6-1, 6-2, 6-3, 6-P, and 18-C

Textbook: 6.033 uses Saltzer and Kaashoek's Principles of Computer System Design: An Introduction (Morgan Kaufmann 2009). The text supplements the lectures and recitations; it should be your first resource when you are confused by a lecture topic, or want more information. If you notice errors of any kind in the 6.033 text, from minor typos to major blunders, please report them by e-mail to saltzer@mit.edu and kaashoek@mit.edu.

You can find PDFs with corrections to the printed and online textbook here . A more up to date version of the Part II errata is here.

Course Structure and Philosophy

6.033 has three components: lectures, recitations, and tutorials. Each are integral to the class, and each serve a different purpose. We are intentional about using active learning techniques across all components of the class, as we have found them to improve participation and engagement. You can read more about that here and here, if you're interested.

Lectures

Lectures are held on Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:00pm-3:00pm. They will be broadcast live on zoom, and recordings will be posted later in the day for those who cannot attend live. The lectures are designed to teach students the technical details necessary to design their own systems and to put those details in larger contexts: both the contexts of a specific area of systems as well as systems in general.

This type of material appears in lectures because that's what lectures are good at: giving a higher-level context for the details of the class.

Recitations

Recitations are held on Tuesdays and Thursdays (schedule below). We will assign you a permanent section during the first week of class.

Recitations are designed to give students a chance to practice their system-analysis and oral communication skills. Each recitation revolves around a particular paper in systems. Through reading these papers, students get a better sense of how communication in the field is done. Recitations are discussion-based; students get practice analyzing, critiquing, and communicating about systems.

Writing Tutorials

Writing tutorials are held on Fridays (schedule below). We will assign you timeslot during the first week of classes.

Most of these tutorials will teach the communication theory and practices of this course, and assist you in preparing for the assignments, particularly the design project. You'll become fluent in a variety of communication genres, develop strategies and skills needed to present technical concepts to different audiences, learn how to use writing to develop and deepen your technical understanding—and get specific, directed instruction on writing and presenting your 6.033 assignments.

Equal Access

The staff of 6.033 is committed to the principle of equal access. We encourage you to meet with Dr. LaCurts to discuss your disability-related needs, including accommodations which you may need in order to fully access this course.

Grading

6.033 consists of three components: technical material, communication/system design and analysis, and participation. Each of these components comprises roughly one third of your grade, according to the following breakdown:

35%:	Technical Material
	30% for Exams (two @ 15% each)
	5% for Hands-ons
40%:	Communication + System design and analysis
	5% for the DP prep assignment
	10% for DP preliminary report + DP presentation
	20% for DP report
	5% for the DP peer review
25%:	Participation
	20% for recitation participation
	5% for communication participation

You must complete all team design project assignments (preliminary report, presentation, final report) in order to pass 6.033. If you do not, you will automatically receive an F.

Grade Components

Each assignment supports the objectives of 6.033 in various ways.

Technical Material

Exams: One exam is held during the term. A second exam will be scheduled during finals week. Each exam will focus on half of the class' material, but keep in mind that later topics in 6.033 build heavily upon the earlier topics. The exams will test material from lectures, recitations, and the assigned reading, and let us test whether students have mastered the technical material.

Hands-ons: During some weeks, you will be expected to complete a hands-on experiment that requires a computer and sometimes the Internet. These assignments reinforce some of the abstract concepts from the lectures or papers that week, and let you find out how things really work.

Communication + System design and analysis

The 6.033 staff have worked with the MIT Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP) program for more than ten years to design 6.033 writing and speaking assignments. We have chosen assignments that are similar to the kinds of writing you will do in the engineering workplace: preliminary reports, final reports, and presentations. Communication assignments are designed to help you conceptualize and develop the design project.

Design Project

The primary assignment in 6.033 is the design project (DP). This project is where the students get to design their own system, which is the primary objective of this course.

The DP requires you to develop a detailed system design to solve a real-world problem. This project will extend over most of the semester, and will be done in teams of three students, all of whom attend the same writing tutorial (with exceptions only for extenuating circumstances). Real-world systems are not built individually; it's always a team effort. Part of the DP is to learn to work productively and effectively in this setting. We will give you tools for doing so in the writing tutorials.

The DP consists of multiple deliverables: a prep assignment, preliminary report, oral presentation, final report, and peer review. The Design Project page gives more detail about the DP deliverables, team assignments, etc.

Participation

Recitation Participation

Our recitations are discussion-based, and we expect you to be engaged and participate. Participating in a recitation means:

Coming prepared to recitation (doing the reading, turning in the pre-reading question etc.)
Asking questions
Paying attention when the instructor is speaking (you can't participation in a discussion if you don't know what it's about)
Participating (verbally) in pair-/group-work
Volunteering to answer questions when the instructor asks them. (Note that you may not get called on each time. That's okay; our class sizes prevent that. Statistically, if you're raising your hand frequently, you'll get called on with some frequency.)
Responding to other student's comments with an opinion of their own.

We will assign the participation grade at the end of the semester. So that you know where you stand throughout the class, we will you three preliminary participation grades (one about a quarter into the semester, one about halfway through, and one three quarters into the semester). We know that getting graded on participation can be stressful in some ways, so we've put together some more details to explain more about our philosophy and how you'll be graded.

Communication Participation

A portion of your participation grade will also be based on your participation in writing tutorials and on your understanding of communication concepts and skills, as demonstrated by your work on the design project and evaluated by your communication instructor.

Note that over a third of your grade comes from written assignments: we expect you to take writing seriously in this class.

Late Policy

If you're unable to hand in an assignment on time, or unable to attend an exam, please talk to Dr. LaCurts. We'll work with you and S3 to come up with a plan. Note that some of the design-project materials have their own late policy, which will be explicitly posted on each assignment.

If you miss an assignment deadline, you should still hand in the assignment; we'll give you feedback even though we won't give you credit for your final grade. Furthermore, doing assignments is the best way to prepare for exams and design project. Unless otherwise specified, assignments are due at 5:00pm on their assigned due-date (hands-ons are due at 11:59pm).

Recitation + Tutorial Schedule

Your recitation and tutorial sections will be assigned during the first week of class. Please don't email us asking if you can be in a specific section! We will send you an email to ask for your schedule input.

Recitation Schedules

All recitation sections meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The times specified are in the Eastern timezone.

Time	Recitation #	Instructor	TA
8:00am-9:00am	1	Mark Day	Avital Baral
9:00am-10:00am	2	Mark Day	Avital Baral
9:00am-10:00am	3	Henry Corrigan-Gibbs	Amir Farhat
10:00am-11:00am	4	Henry Corrigan-Gibbs	Amir Farhat
	5	Karen Sollins	Yunyi Zhu
	6	Howard Shrobe	Felipe Monsalve
11:00am-12:00pm	7	Karen Sollins	Amir Farhat
	8	Howard Shrobe	Felipe Monsalve
	9	John Feser	Rachel Wei
	10	Mohammad Alizadeh	Yunyi Zhu
12:00pm-1:00pm	11	John Feser	Rachel Wei
	12	Mohammad Alizadeh	Yunyi Zhu
	13	Sam DeLaughter	Nick Kaashoek
1:00pm-2:00pm	14	Sam DeLaughter	Nick Kaashoek
1:00pm-2:00pm	15	Mike Cafarella	Christabel Sitienei
2:00pm-3:00pm	16	Mike Cafarella	Christabel Sitienei
2:00pm-3:00pm	17	Farnaz Jahanbakhsh	Wesley Woo
3:00pm-4:00pm	18	Farnaz Jahanbakhsh	Wesley Woo
3:00pm-4:00pm	19	Hari Balakrishnan	Ming Wang
4:00pm-5:00pm	20	Hari Balakrishnan	Ming Wang
7:00pm-8:00pm	21	Larry Rudolph	Phi Xu
8:00pm-9:00pm	22	Larry Rudolph	Phi Xu

Tutorial Schedules

All tutorial sections meet on Fridays at the specified time.

Time	Tutorial #	Instructor
8:00am-9:00am	1	Jessie Stickgold-Sarah
9:00am-10:00am	2	Atissa Banuazizi
1:00pm-2:00pm	3	David Larson
	4	Juergen Schoenstein
	5	Keith Clavin
	6	Laura McKee
	7	Michael Trice
	8	Amy Carleton
	9	Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
2:00pm-3:00pm	10	Michael Trice
	11	Amy Carleton
	12	Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
	13	Andreas Karatsolis
	14	Thomas Pickering
	15	Michael Maune
3:00pm-4:00pm	16	Mary Caulfield
	17	Michael Maune
	18	Linda Sutliff
7:00pm-8:00pm	19	Michael Maune

Collaboration

You may not collaborate on exams. On hands-ons, it's okay to discuss ideas with your classmates, but you should not be collaborating on the actual answers. Take the UNIX hands-on for example: it's okay to talk to your classmates about what pipes are, it's not okay to work together to come up with a command that gives a long listing of the smallest give files in the /etc directory whose name contains the string ".conf", sorted by increasing file size (i.e., the solution to one of the first questions).

On all writing assignments you are welcome to discuss ideas with others, but your writing should be your own and you should acknowledge all contributions of ideas by others, whether from classmates or from papers you have read.

Staff

To contact the course staff as a whole, please use Piazza unless you need to email a staff member individually. You can post a private question on Piazza if you do not want your communication to be visible to the other students in the class.

Role	Name	Email
Lecturer	Katrina LaCurts	`lacurts at mit.edu`
Recitation Instructors	Mohammad Alizadeh	`alizadeh at mit.edu`
	Hari Balakrishnan	`hari at csail.mit.edu`
	Henry Corrigan-Gibbs	`henrycg at csail.mit.edu`
	Michael Cafarella	`michjc at mit.edu`
	Mark Day	`mday at mit.edu`
	Samuel DeLaughter	`samd at mit.edu`
	John Feser	`feser at mit.edu`
	Farnaz Jahanbakhsh	`farnazj at mit.edu`
	Larry Rudolph	`rudolph at csail.mit.edu`
	Howard Shrobe	`hes at csail.mit.edu`
	Karen Sollins	`sollins at csail.mit.edu`
WRAP Instructors	Atissa Banuazizi	`atissa at mit.edu`
	Amy Carleton	`amymarie at mit.edu`
	Mary Caulfield	`mcaulf at mit.edu`
	Keith Clavin	`clavin at mit.edu`
	Andreas Karatsolis	`karatsol at mit.edu`
	Dave Larson	`larsond at mit.edu`
	Michael Maune	`mmaune at mit.edu`
	Laura McKee	`lmckee at mit.edu`
	Thomas Pickering	`tpick at mit.edu`
	Juergen Schoenstein	`juergen at mit.edu`
	Jessie Stickgold-Sarah	`jmss at mit.edu`
	Linda Sutliff	`lsutliff at mit.edu`
	Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze	`rtb at mit.edu`
	Michael Trice	`mtrice at mit.edu`
TAs	Avital Baral	`abaral at mit.edu`
	Johnny Bui	`jbui at mit.edu`
	Amir Farhat	`amirf at mit.edu`
	Nick Kaashoek	`nicolaas at mit.edu`
	Evan Kim	`evankim at mit.edu`
	Felipe Monsalve	`monsalve at mit.edu`
	Christabel Sitienei	`sitienei at mit.edu`
	Ming Wang	`mingwang at mit.edu`
	Rachel Wei	`rachywei at mit.edu`
	Wesley Woo	`weswoo at mit.edu`
	Phi Xu	`helenxu at mit.edu`
	Yunyi Zhu	`yunyizhu at mit.edu`
LAs	Jay Lang	`jaytlang at mit.edu`
	Joshua Lee	`jlee2022 at mit.edu`
	Meenal Parakh	`meenalp at mit.edu`
	Katherine Xiao	`klxiao at mit.edu`
	Yang Yan	`yangilga at mit.edu`