Overview

Cloud computing is transforming the computing landscape by shifting the hardware and staffing costs of managing computational infrastructure to third parties such as Yahoo! or Amazon. Small organizations and individuals are now able to deploy world-scale services: all they need to pay is the marginal cost of actual resource usage. At the same time, virtual machine (VM) technology has emerged as an enabler of cloud computing. Virtualization provides many benefits, including security, performance isolation, ease of management, and flexibility of running in a user-customized environment. However, the design, implementation, and deployment of virtualized clouds raises many research challenges including automated service provisioning, service monitoring and management, resource elasticity and cloud programming models, among others.

This course starts with an introductory lecture on the main technologies that make possible cloud computing and an overview of open challenges. The main part of the course, however, consists of student-lead discussions of relevant research papers. A research-intensive group project is a fundamental part of the course. The result of these projects will be presented in a conference-like session at the end of the semester.

For a more comprehensive description of course requirements click here . For a list of suggested research projects click here.

Grading

• Research paper presentation 20%
• Research paper summaries 20%
• Project report and presentation 50%
• Class participation 10%

Pre-requisites

Basic understanding of operating system principles and knowledge of network programming.

Schedule

Note: Some files are only accesible from computers within the UofT network.