Noah Mendelsohn Visiting Scholar Operating Systems, Distributed systems, & Web

© 2010 Noah Mendelsohn 2 A bit about me  Long career in industry and academia –IBM, Stanford, Lotus, MIT, LOCUS (UCLA-spinoff), etc. –Mix of research, development, ad-tech, cross-industry collaboration –Retired from IBM in 2010 – currently IBM Distinguished Engineer Emeritus  Areas of expertise: –Operating systems, Distributed systems, Programming languages, –Document-based computing (XML), Performance tuning, Systems architecture, Object-oriented & component systems  Known for contributions to: –Java (co-inventor of JavaBeans); XML, SOAP (editor for specifications) –Distributed/fault-tolerant systems (e.g. LOCUS & Datacube), Virtual Machines, World Wide Web  Have always loved teaching: –Taught introductory programming at Stanford –Guest lecture at universities, academic, and industry conferences

© 2010 Noah Mendelsohn 3 The W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) The senior technical body responsible for the Web

COMP 150-IDS: Internet-scale Distributed Systems Lessons from the World Wide Web A course on system design principles

© 2010 Noah Mendelsohn 5 The course will explore several threads in parallel: 1.We will look top-down at various principles of distributed system architecture 2.We learn to build Internet clients and servers that communicate 3.We will contrast several styles of distributed systems 4.We will explore the history of computer networking, and explain why the Web is designed the way it is

© 2010 Noah Mendelsohn 6  A course on designing Web applications (COMP 20/120)  An comprehensive OS course (COMP 111)  An comprehensive networking course (COMP 112)  A programming languages course (several)  However...we will explore issues relating to all of those! What this course is not

© 2010 Noah Mendelsohn 7 We are looking for Teaching Assistants! Help students with programming assignments Help me to test student submissions Hired by the hour (I think!)

© 2010 Noah Mendelsohn 8 More information / contacting me  My Tufts home page:  COMP 150-IDS home:  Personal home page: 

© 2010 Noah Mendelsohn 9 Thank you!

© 2010 Noah Mendelsohn 11 Prerequisites  Formal requirement –COMP 40 or permission  Informal requirement –Good ability to program in C/C++ at level of COMP 11/15 (structs, classes, methods assumed; we will teach here but not assume knowledge of inheritance and exceptions) –Ability to deal with complex systems challenges at level of COMP 40 –Assume you know how to use Hallgan facilities, ssh into linux.eecs.tufts.edu, etc