Web Architecture

Future Challenges

Class home page: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~zaher/classes/CS851.html

Instructor
Tarek Abdelzaher, 236B Olsson, 982-2227, zaher@cs.virginia.edu

Lecture Times
First meeting: Tuesday, Jan 25th, 3:30pm, 228E Olsson
Schedule: Tuesday and Thursday 3:30pm-4:45pm, 228E Olsson

Description
The Internet is undergoing substantial changes from a communication and browsing infrastructure to a medium for conducting business and providing a myriad of emerging services. The World Wide Web exports a uniform and widely-accepted interface for these services. These changes places the web at the center of a gradually emerging critical service infrastructure with increasing requirements for service quality, reliability, and security guarantees in an unpredictable, heterogeneous, and highly dynamic environment. This course reviews the current state-of-the-art of today's Web architecture, describes the challenges facing the Web, and discusses the emerging approaches to cope with them. The goal of the course it to gain understanding of the current research issues and paint a vision of the next generation Web architecture for the beginning of the new century. Topics will include:

Web traffic characterization; where the bottlenecks come from.
Protocols (HTTP 1.0, HTTP 1.1 and beyond)
Web server performance
Issues in server clustering
Proxy caching architectures; present and emerging approaches
Towards Quality of Service (QoS) on the Web
E-commerce and multimedia support

Coursework and grading
The course will involve a fair amount of paper reading. The class will be divided into groups of up to 3 people. Each group collectively will be required to:

prepare two to four papers per week (from the reading list) on the topic of interest covered in class, and
type a half-page to one page summary of the paper indicating:
- The main contribution(s) of the paper from the perspective of the group.
- A critique (positive and/or negative) of this paper.
- The points of strength (best things you liked about the paper).
- The points of weakness (things you didn't like about the paper).
- Opportunities for future work on the topic.

Summaries of assigned research papers (one per group) are to be submitted to the instructor by e-mail before noon of the day of the class. (Please include the words ``851 SUMMARY'' in the subject of the e-mail, and include the title of the critiqued paper in the body.) A discussion of the research topic will ensue in class. 30% of the grade will be assigned on class participation, discussion, and summaries of research papers. More credit will be given to groups or individuals with creative and originial opinions, and on their ability to defend their correctness. 70% of the grade will be determined by a substantial course project. The project will implement some innovative aspect of the next generation world wide web architecture. Students will be allowed to work in groups of up to 3 on the project. Access will be provided to a testbed of 10 PC-based servers, as well as to web server, cache proxy, OS, and web benchmarking source code. The project will procede through the following landmarks:

The project will be chosen by each group within the first two weeks of class. The class web page has suggestions on possible projects. Groups are encouraged to come up with their own ideas.
Each group will schedule a weekly meeting with the instructor to discuss progress and problems on their project of interest.
Each group will prepare a two page project proposal. The proposals are to be submitted to the instructor before Spring Break. The proposal should include a credible set of initial project results, a list of further proposed milestones, and a plan of action for the rest of the semester.
Each group is responsible for a short project presentation in class, on 3/21. The presentation will allow others to critique the initial results and current state of the project and give constructive feedback to group members.
Final project presentations will be conducted by each group the week of 4/24.
Final projects are due the first day of finals. This includes (i) a complete set of results, software artifacts, demos, or theoretical findings developed in the project, and (ii) a 20-page project report explaining the main contributions. The report follows the standard technical paper format.

Successful projects should result in a conference-quality paper in one of the web-related or QoS-related research conferences.