COMP9334 Capacity Planning of Computer Systems and Networks

COMP9334 Capacity Planning of Computer Systems and Networks
COURSE OUTLINE (last updated 22.03.2012)

Session 1, 2012

Table of Contents

Staff Contact Details
Course Information
Teaching Strategies
Assessment
Academic Honesty and Plagiarism
Course Schedule
Course Resource List
Course Evaluation and Development
Communications via E-Mail
Other Information

	Name	E-mail id	Phone	Office	Consultation Hours
Lecturer-in-charge	Prof. Sanjay Jha	sanjay	Send email	K17-611	Thursday 12.00 - 1.00 pm
Co-Lecturer	TBA
Lab Coordinator	Lukas Li	kail	Send email	See Notice	Mon 11-12.00 AM (during advised weeks only)

Course Information

Units of Credit: 6

Pre-requisites: COMP9331 or COMP3331

Assumed Knowledge: Communications protocols, basic computer systems architecture, mathematics including calculus, linear algebra and probability, basic programming.

Aims: Students will learn techniques for performance evaluation of distributed systems. These techniques will then be applied to designing systems to have good performance, and to the analysis of future workloads and the system changes required to cope with them.

Learning Outcomes: On completion of this course, the students will have developed:

Understanding of capacity planning principles;
Ability to develop models of practical applications and evaluate their performance by rigorous analytical means and by programming computer simulations;
Problem-solving abilities, characterized by flexibility of approach;
Analytical, critical and creative thinking, with an aptitude for continued self-directed learning.

Graduate Attributes: The students will be encouraged to develop the following UNSW graduate attributes by undertaking the selected activities and knowledge content:

The skills involved in scholarly enquiry;
The capacity for analytical and critical thinking and for creative problem solving;
The ability to engage in independent and reflective learning;
Information literacy - the skills to appropriately locate, evaluate and use relevant information.

These attributes will be assessed within the prescribed assessment tasks.

Teaching Strategies

The course consists of three contact hours per week.
The lectures are designed to facilitate learning and understanding of the important concepts within course syllabus focusing especially on the principles, concepts and methods behind the capacity planning of computer systems and networks. Lecture notes will be available at the course web site for download before the lecture.
A number of sample problems will be issued each week and will be discussed in the tutorial session of the following week. These sample problems give the students a chance to test whether they have understood the concepts introduced in the lectures. Solutions to all sample problems will be published on the course web site.
The course also includes one lab component. The purpose is for students to get some hands-on experience of performance measurement and monitoring, and gain deeper understanding of the concepts discussed in the lectures.

Assessment

There will be 6 assessment components as described below:

Assignment	Available in parts from Week3
Lab	Available in Week - 4, written report on the Lab due in Week -7
Project	Available in TBA, written report on the Project due in TBA
Mid-semester class test	Week 7, (12:00 – 14:00), open book, for weeks 1-6 lectures, no formal lecture
Final examination	In formal exam period, open book (Format TBA in review week)

The marks for the above components will be grouped into the two categories as follows:

	Assignment (A)	Examination (E)
	Assignment -multipart (40 marks)	Mid-semester class test (50 marks)
	Lab (25 marks)	Final examination (50 marks)
	Project (35 marks)

Total	A (100 marks)	E (100 marks)

Make sure that you submit your assignments on time. Follow the submission directions in the assignments carefully. Late submissions will be penalised according to the rules specified in the assignment specifications.

Your final mark (M) will be computed as the harmonic mean of your Assignment mark (A) and Examination mark (E):

M = 2 * A * E / (A + E)

To obtain a minimum Pass grade, the following conditions MUST be satisfied:

1 - Your final mark (M) should be greater than 50.

2 - Your grade in both categories (A and E) should be greater than 40 marks each.

Academic Honesty and Plagiarism

All submissions are routinely subject to scrutiny for similarities with other students' assignments. If you copy from another person, or get an unreasonable amount of help from a friend (so your assignment begins to look like theirs), or if you work very closely with someone, there is a good chance we will detect it. When we do, you will be penalised. At the very least, you will lose some or all marks for that assignment. In the past, students have been automatically failed for submitting stolen assignments. Further details of the School plagiarism policy can be found here. (You acknowledged receipt of these rules when you obtained your CSE computer account, and the link above is for your convenience so that you can review the rules now.)

We are aware that a lot of learning takes place in student conversations, and don't wish to discourage those. However, it is important, for both those helping others and those being helped, not to provide/accept any programming language code in writing, as this is apt to be used exactly as is, and lead to plagiarism penalties for both the supplier and the copier of the codes. Write something on a piece of paper, by all means, but tear it up/take it away when the discussion is over.

If you are new to studying in Australia, be aware that attitudes to plagiarism at UNSW may be different from those in your home country. Make sure you are clear about the rules here at UNSW. In brief, and for the purposes of COMP9334, plagiarism includes copying or obtaining all, or a substantial part, of the material for your assignment, whether programming language code, or written or graphical report material, without written acknowledgement in your assignment from:

1. a location on the internet;

2. a book, article or other written document (whether published or unpublished) whether electronic or on paper or other medium;

3. another student, whether in your class or another class;

4. a non-student (e.g. from someone who writes assignments for money).

Note also that there is a big difference between being able to understand someone else's code, and writing that code yourself from scratch. A computer programmer has to be able to write code from scratch. The assignments provide opportunities for you to develop the skills necessary to write your own simulation/computation code. Use these opportunities!

Course Schedule

The course will meet each Tuesday 12:00 - 15:00 for 12 weeks in Central Lecture Central Lecture Block 3 (K-E19-G04), please confirm this before start of session for any last minute change. The following table lists the tentative schedule. Students will be informed of any changes during the lecture and by announcements on the notices page.

Week	Date	Topics	Notes
1	28^th Feb	Course overview; Introduction to capacity planning; Workload characterization
2	6^th March	Operational Analysis
3	13^rd March	Mean Value Analysis
4	20^th March	Markov models
5	27^h March	Simulation Part-I
6	3^rdApril	Simulation Part-II
-	6^th- 15^th April	Mid-term break
7	17^th April	Mid-term test	12:00-13:00 during lecture time, no formal lecture
8	24^th April	Queueing systems – Part I
9	1^st May	Queueing systems – Part II
10	8^th May	Optimisation – Part I
11	15^th May	Optimisation – Part II
12	22^th May	TBA
13	29th May	Review

Course Resource List

Textbook:

Daniel A. Menasce, Virgilio A.F. Almeida and Lawrence W. Dowdy, Performance by Design, Prentice Hall PTR, 2004.

Reference Texts:

Mohammed S. Obaidat and Noureddine A. Boudriga, Fundamentals of performance evaluation of computer and telecommunications systems, Wiley 2010
Raj Jain, The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis: Techniques for Experimental Design, Measurement, Simulation, and Modeling, Wiley, 1991.
Dimitri Bertsekas and Robert Gallager, Data Networks, Prentice Hall, Second Edition, 1992.
Averill M. Law and W. David Kelton, Simulation Modeling and Analysis, McGraw-Hill, Second Edition, 1991.
Wayne L. Winston, Operations Research: Applications and Algorithms, Duxbury Press, Third Edition, 1994.

Other Resources: Lecture materials may also be drawn from journal papers, conference papers and magazine articles published by professional bodies such as IEEE and ACM.

Software Availability:

For the lab, we will be using several Unix-based network performance toolkits. The detail purpose of these toolkits and information on how to use them will be provided in the lab handout.
For the lab D-ITG traffic generating software and Netem network emulator will be used.
You can choose any programming language to do computation and simulation. For illustration purposes, sample code will be given in Matlab scripts.
Matlab/Octave tutorials can be found at http://www.physics.metu.edu.tr/~hande/teaching/octave-tutorial.pdf or http://www.engin.umich.edu/group/ctm/basic/basic.html
For illustration purposes, we will be using the modeling language AMPL and the solver CPLEX for solving the optimisation problems. Student editions of the software are available for download. Follow the instructions provided here for AMPL and here for CPLEX.

Course Evaluation and Development

Student feedback on this course, and on the lecturing in this course, will be gathered via an online questionnaire, which will be e-mailed to all students towards the end of the session. Student feedback is taken seriously, and continual improvements are made to the course based in part on this feedback. The course questionnaire results go to the Head of the School of Computer Science and Engineering, who reads the results and follows up in cases where action is clearly needed. In response to past student feedback, we have changed the order of assessment and allowed for more time to work on project.

Communications via E-Mail

All students MUST read 'Notices' from the course web-site for any updates or notices regularly. Students must also check their school e-mail regularly for announcements regarding this course.

Students must follow the proper communication channels:

The official course mailing address (cs9334@cse.unsw.edu.au) should only be used for students who have personal problems and wish to seek help from Lecturer or Lab Coordinator on confidential basis. Please allow up to a few days to receive a reply. If it's urgent, use the consultation hours.
If you are e-mailing us from a non-cse e-mail account (such as hotmail, yahoo, etc), please include your full name and student number in the e-mail to enable us to identify the sender.
Do not send direct emails to LIC, Lecturer, Lab Coordinator, etc. via their personal email addresses. Emails received at private accounts will not be read and automatically deleted without reply.
You can also use the Message Board discussion .

Other Information

Students enrolled in COMP9334 are expected to attend all classes
The use of School of Computer Science and Engineering computing laboratories is subject to rules described in the Yellow Form, which you acknowledge (electronic) receipt of when you receive your computing account. The Yellow Form also outlines what to do in case illness or misadventure that affects your assessment, and supplementary examinations procedures within the School of Computer Science and Engineering.
Information on UNSW Occupational Health and Safety policies and expectations
Student Equity and Diversity issues