CSE 222A - Graduate Networking - Fall 2024

 

Instructor

• George Porter
• gmporter@ucsd.edu
• Office: CSE 3104

 

Teaching Assistant

• Rukshani Athapathu
• Office: B250A 

 

Class meeting

• Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 3:00 to 3:50 pm
• Location: WLH 2204

 

Final exam

• Dec 13, 2024 3-6pm (location not announced yet)

 

Office hours

• Porter: Wednesday 11am-noon (or by appointment)
• Athapathu: Monday 2 pm - 3 pm

 

Textbook

• This course does not have a required textbook. However, I strongly recommend using an undergraduate networking textbook as a reference. A good reference is by Peterson & Davie
• https://book.systemsapproach.org/

 

Offline class discussion

• Piazza

 

Prerequisite

• An undergraduate networking course from your institution, similar to UCSD’s CSE 123

 

Note: The format of this course is somewhat unusual. It is a highly interactive discussion-based course with significant class participation. As a result, students are expected to attend class and engage in person. Classes will not be recorded and remote participation is not supported. See the "Class Participation" section below for more details.

Course objectives

 

The purpose of this course is to engage with state-of-the-art topics in the networking research community. We will look at recent innovations within the network, including wide-area topics, datacenters, virtualized networks, cloud computing, AI/ML, and sustainable computer and networked systems designs. We will examine networking research in both the context of historical systems as well as in modern systems.

In addition to learning about specific research projects, in this course you will learn:

• How to read a research paper in an objective manner.
• How to write a critical analysis of the research described in a paper.
• How to articulate your understanding of and insights into a research paper.
• How to synthesize research themes and topics across multiple papers.

Reading List

The course is not based on a textbook or lectures. Instead, the course material will come from seminal, noteworthy, or representative papers from the literature. Each class meeting (except the first) will have one or two assigned papers to read. You should read these papers before coming to class, and be prepared to discuss them. Occasionally we will also list recommended papers; you are encouraged to read those, but not required. Students often find it useful to discuss papers together before the class period, and we encourage the practice (see more on collaboration below).

Class participation

 

The structure of this course is unusual in that there are no slide-based presentations during the class period. Instead, we will discuss research papers that we will have all read before each class period.

I will lead the class discussions by asking questions of students in class. Some of these questions will be directed at specific students at random, and in other cases you will use a ‘clicker’ to answer the question, and we’ll steer the conversation based on those clicker responses.  Note that your answers to these questions form a part of your overall grade, so it is important that you both show up to class as well as read the papers carefully. To give you some structure for reading through the papers, keep the following questions in mind and ask yourself how you would answer these questions about each paper:

• What problem does the paper address?
• How is it different from previous work, if any?
• What is the approach used to solve the problem?
• How does the paper support or otherwise justify its arguments and conclusions?
• How do the authors evaluate their work? What metrics or techniques do they use to justify their conclusions?
• Was the paper, in your judgment, successful in addressing the problem?

You might have to miss class for very good reasons (e.g., travel, interview, etc.). Please clear these absences with me beforehand as soon as you are aware of them. Since you will not be in class to participate in discussion, to help motivate you to make sure you stay on top of the readings I ask that you write a brief evaluation of the papers for the class that you will miss (or give you targeted questions to answer about the paper(s)).

Homework/assignments

 

Most classes will have some type of activity I’ll ask you to do in preparation for class time.  This could involve answering some thought questions, writing a summary of the paper, or some other type of activity.  In addition, during some of the class periods we’ll do activities together in class, for example short writing sessions then presenting our work to the other members of the class.

 

Project

 

During the quarter you’ll gain first-hand experience with networking and cloud platforms, in particular Amazon Web Services (AWS).  This project is estimated to last a couple weeks, and at the end you’ll submit any code you wrote as well as a short report on what you found.  Details on the project are not yet finalized.

 

Exam

 

We will have one exam at the end of the quarter. The exam is closed notes with a two-page "cheat-sheet". You must be physically present on campus at the time and location assigned by the registrar (which hasn’t yet been announced as of the writing of this syllabus).

MS students: Note that the CSE 222A final exam satisfies the MS competency exam. After the course, you do not have to take a separate comps exam.

Grading

The grading breakdown for the course is:

• Active class participation: 20%
• Assignments and homework: 20%
• Project: 30%
• Final: 30%

Late assignments will not be accepted without prior approval from the instructor. 

Collaboration

Papers. I strongly encourage you to discuss the papers with other students in the class — you may have insights that others do not, and vice versa. Often students form reading groups, which I heartily encourage. Note that group discussion, however, is not an effective substitute for actually reading the paper.

Assignments and homework. You can also discuss the homework problems, but you must independently complete the assignments yourself. As a rule of thumb, you can discuss a homework problem in the lounge with others, walk home, wash the dishes, and then write up your answer to the problem on your own. You cannot, however, discuss homework problems with others and then write your answers to those problems at the same time.

Project. You can complete the course project as a team. You can discuss project materials with others in the course, but your code must have been authored exclusively by members of your team; you may not copy code from another team or make your code available to others.

Exam. The exam is an individual effort.

You are expected to be aware of UCSD's academic honesty guidelines. Any violation of the course or university policies will be treated very seriously, and could lead to severe repercussions. Don't cheat. It's not worth it.

AI: You don’t need (nor should you use) any AI technology this term (except possibly for the project as described below)–just your brain (i.e. just “I”).  You shouldn’t use AI to summarize papers, or to generate any text submitted as part of the class.  Do not use AI to “edit” or “clean up” your writing either.  If English is not your native language, that’s totally fine–I don’t evaluate your knowledge of the English language, only your knowledge of networking research.  For the project, you can use AI to help generate code if you want (though again, that’s not needed). Note that for your project you will need to submit your code including any details as to any AI you used.