Parallel Data Processing in MapReduce F’17

prereqs

Students should have taken the Algorithms course, should enjoy programming and strive to write beautiful code.

staff

Instructors: Jan Vitek and Konrad Siek Teaching Assistant: Aviral Goel

Communication with staff is exclusively through Piazza. Use private notes for messages that should not be visible to other students.

work

Approximatively fifteen hours a week, with regular codewalks and in-class tests.

grading

The class grade is on 100 points with 33 points for in-class participation (quizzes, questions, paper presentation, note taking), 34 points for the final project (software, report and oral defense) and 33 points for codewalks. The final grade is given on a scale of A=90, A-=85, B+=80, B=75, B-=70, C=65, D=55. Codewalks conducted in class focus on the student’s code output and graded based on code quality.

authorship

Every code element (file or function) must have a note ascribing authorship to an initial author and, possibly, multiple maintainers. Sharing code is allowed. Changing authorship is cheating.

integrity

Cheating means an F to all involved parties, expulsion from the class and notification of ORAF.

presence

There will be few traditional lectures, instead we discuss code, books and papers. Student will answer questions about assigned reading during class. Students should notify the instructor of absences. A scribe will record discussions in a shared document.

hours

Reception hours are held daily M,W,R from 11 am to 12 am. Class is in the Forsyth Building, room 129, Tuesday, Friday 3:30 – 5:00.

regrades

All regrade requests and grade challenges must be submitted in writing, private posts on Piazza, no more than 7 days after the grade was awarded.

codewalks

A code review is conducted after each task. Teams review other teams’ work, commenting on code quality, design, documentation and tests. The goal is to produce actionable suggestions for improvements. The output of a review is a report. Code walks are in-class discussions of programming tasks that start from a code review and explore the implementation of a student’s project. Review are emailed in PDF to the instructor and code authors. They comment on the report, code and packaging. The report should give sufficient information to understand what was achieved. It should be clear and complete. The code should be well documents, avoid repetition, have no obvious bugs, have authorship comments. The packaging should make the results easily reproducible. Be curious about the code. Question the results. Don’t waste space in your report on what works well – spend your time on what could be improved. Avoid generalities, be precise, give examples.

reading