CS525, Advanced Distributed Systems: Project Resources


Project Ideas:

There are many many open directions for your projects, be they entrepreneurial or research. Your best ideas will likely come from the following sources:

Books on Entrepreneurship:

There are plenty of these! (Just search on Google or Amazon). Three of them that are particularly wonderful to read are:

  1. “Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days” by Jessica Livingston. (Very technical book with lots of interviews!)
  2. “The Intelligent Entrepreneur” by Bill Murphy Jr. (Tale of three Harvard Business School Students and how they successfully founded companies.)
  3. “The Innovator’s Dilemma - When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail” by Clayton M. Christensen (A wonderful illustration of disruptive technologies, layered atop an exciting history of the storage/disk industry).

For your Wiki Term Paper, the material in the above books will not suffice! That is, you have to have more material for your term paper than in any of the above books.

Experimental Testbeds: We are trying to get all students access to a few VMs in the CS VM server farm (details forthcoming by Jan-end). Students can also request course staff for a PlanetLab slice, or Emulab project (there are limited number of slots available for each: about 5 projects on each testbed). Therefore, (1) all requests will be granted on an as-needed basis, and (2) you will be given an account on typically only one of these testbeds, so please choose carefully depending on your project requirements! In general, there are plenty of cluster resources available in the department, so try to procure some of those! (alternately, AWS and sometimes Google cloud/Azure give out student grants, which you have to apply for individually).

Previous Course Incarnations:

How to Read a Paper

Learning how to write a good paper is a slow process that evolves by assimilation, often over your entire lifetime. The best way to start learning is to actually get started on writing your first one! The best way to continue producing good papers is to develop a systematic approach to technical writing. Whichever stage your research career is in, Scattered Systems helps you achieve both of the above goals by having you write a paper in three stages: Survey, Midterm report, and Final report (with added perks for the best papers). Here are some extra tips on reading and writing papers.

A small list of links for projects in distributed systems :

Misc. Interesting Links:

For everything else, use Google !


Maintained by Indranil Gupta - indy at illinois dawt edu