Micro-Seminar: Distributed Systems: a powerful tool that makes big data useful PART ONE

Micro-Seminars have two parts. Attendance to both parts is required. Registering for the PART ONE session will automatically enroll you in the PART TWO session on Friday.

Part 1: Thursday, August 22, 2024 from 3:00 – 4:30 pm (PST)
Part 2: Friday, August 23, 2024 from 10:00 – 11:30 am (PST)

Distributed systems are a powerful tool that enables scaling storage and computation power at relatively cheap costs. Young students are typically exposed to computer science through HCI, robotics, or algorithms. They still get exposure to distributed systems until they take advanced courses in college. This seminar aims to give freshman students exposure to distributed systems early on. This course is composed of lectures on why distributed systems are important, and why working with distributed systems is hard but fun. It will also give the opportunity for students to try out distributed systems on a real cluster of servers.

** Expected learning outcomes **
- Introduction to distributed systems: how it is used in today’s web services, big data analytics, and deep learning.
- Experience the power of distributed systems in scaling capacity and reducing latency.
- Learn challenges in using distributed systems.
- Some examples of research problems in distributed systems.
- First-hand experience with distributed systems on real server clusters.

** Day 1 syllabus **
- Introduction to distributed systems
- Use cases of distributed systems
- History of how distributed systems changed the world
- Activity: Remote Procedure Call (RPC) intro

** Day 2 syllabus **
- Challenges in distributed systems
- Some research examples
- Activity: Build your own distributed system with RPC.

** Target audience ** Any students interested in computer science and want to learn about the area of distributed systems. Some activities will require programming experience in Python or C++.

Lead By: Professor Seo Jin Park

Seo Jin Park has been an Assistant Professor at the USC Computer Science Department since 2023 Fall and co-lead the USC Networked Systems Lab. Before joining USC, he spent a year at Google Systems Research Group. He completed my postdoc at MIT CSAIL with Prof. Mohammad Alizadeh. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2019, where I was advised by Prof. John Ousterhout. His research has been centered on lowering the latencies of networked systems, ranging over in-memory storage, consensus protocol, datacenter overload control, byzantine consensus, etc.

Academic Honors and Fellowships | Website | View More Events

Contact the organizers