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Semester 1

Extreme Computing (INFR11088)

Course Website

http://course.inf.ed.ac.uk/exc

Subject

Informatics

College

SCE

Credits

10

Normal Year Taken

4

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Visiting students are required to have comparable background to that assumed by the course prerequisites listed in the Degree Regulations & Programmes of Study. If in doubt, consult the course organiser (lecturer).

Course Summary

Extreme Computing deals with the principles, systems and algorithms behind Web-scale problem solving. This touches upon the technologies and techniques used by companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, using warehouse-scale computing and massive datasets. The course will be in three parts: the principles behind extreme computing (cloud computing, scaling, performance, etc.), supporting infrastructure (distributed file systems, replication, Web services etc.) and algorithms (Map/Reduce, case studies from Natural Language Processing, data processing, machine learning, data streaming).

Course Description

The course is to be conceptually split into three main areas, with each area not necessarily accounting for an equal portion of the syllabus. The three areas and the material covered in each area are as follows: * Background: Motivation for new computing paradigms; introduction and differences between cloud and cluster computing; scaling and performance. * Infrastructure: Distributed file systems; multi-tier systems, virtualisation; replication; fault tolerance; concurrent programming; web services. * Data structures and algorithms: decentralised data structures; programming frameworks; design and implementation of Map/Reduce programs; dealing with massive amounts of data; case studies from natural language processing, data processing, machine and deep learning; and computation over infinite streams.The course will also deal with the legal, social, ethical, and professional issues involved in remotely storing data in cloud deployments and will also deal with potential solutions to these problems

Assessment Information

Written Exam 100%, Coursework 0%, Practical Exam 0%

Additional Assessment Information

The assessment is entirely based on a written exam. However, as this is a practical course touching a large of number of programming-oriented topics, there are programming questions in the exam that needs to be answered on paper.

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