CIS 455 / 555: Internet and Web Systems (Spring 2020)

Similarly, the course covers stream processors and "big data analytics" platforms like MapReduce, Apache Storm, Spark, etc. -- from the perspective of how they work. For details on using such systems, see CIS 545. Here you'll actually build such systems! We will examine how XML standards enable information exchange; how web services support cross-platform interoperability (and what their limitations are); how "cloud computing" services work; how to do replication and Akamai-like content distribution; and how application servers provide transaction support in distributed environments. We will study techniques for locating machines, resources, and data (including directory systems, information retrieval indexing and ranking, web search, and publish/subscribe systems); we will discuss collaborative filtering and mining the Web for patterns; we will investigate how different architectures support scalability and distributed coordination (and the issues they face). We will also examine the ideas that have been proposed for tomorrow's Web, and see some of the challenges, research directions, and potential pitfalls.

An important goal of the course is not simply to discuss issues and solutions, but to provide hands-on experience with a substantial implementation project. This semester's project will be a peer-to-peer implementation of a Google-style search engine, including distributed, scalable crawling; indexing with ranking; stream processing; and even PageRank on your own MapReduce-style implementation!

As a side effect of the material of this course, you will learn about some aspects of large-scale software development: assimilating large APIs, thinking about modularity, reading other people's code, managing versions, debugging, and so on.

CIS555 is now a core course for the MSE degree, as well as an option for the WPE-I requirement for PhD students. If you are taking the course for your WPE-I, please let Andreas know as soon as you register. The exam-based option is not available for CIS555.

The Daily Pennsylvanian published a nice article about CIS455/555.