Extreme Computing

First practical assignment

The goal of this assignment is to write a 3000-word essay (roughly, 6-8 pages of text) on the infrastructure and uses of cloud computing. More specifically, you are given a description of a computing problem. You have to analyse this decription further, identify how it relates to the issues touched upon during the lectures, and then propose a computing infrastucture to address the problem at hand.

The proposed infrastructure can be in the form of an architectural diagram, or a simple bulleted list of points. There are no requirements set in stone, choose whichever form you think makes more sense for your presentation style.

Also, this being an essay, means that there is no right or wrong answer. Of course, some answers make more sense than others (for instance, saying "I would use 10,000 monkeys to write random code for me" is an interesting experiment but makes little sense). The basic rule of thumb is that if you can argue about what you have written, in the sense of exhibiting a clear way of thinking and providing supporting objective arguments, then the result is perfectly acceptable.

Context

Massbase is a new startup company that is active in the area of data gathering and analytics. In particular, they are in the business of building online recommendation engines, but with a twist. Their goal is to scavenge tweets from Twitter and status messages from Google+ and Facebook--or any social networking medium that is hip these days--and identify relevant user interests. They call each such piece of information a blip. Each blip, apart from the actual text, is also tagged with certain structured pieces of information, provided by the APIs of the aforementioned services: the originating user; a location; perhaps if it contains references to other users; and so on.

Massbase will operate with subscriptions. That is, users of the service will register with the company and allow them access to their blips. Massbase have the following rough set of specifications/requirements for the service they aim to provide:

Being impressed with you having taken Extreme Computing and your excellent mark in the course, Massbase made you a job offer you could not resist and have decided to put you in charge of infrastructure. What they want you to do is come up with a proposal for the architecture of the underlying system they will use. Specifically, the investors have given the company an infrastructure budget to be spent over the next two years in any way the company sees fit -- at which point the investors in the startup will evaluate whether Massbase will receive further funding, or they will pull the plug. You responsibility in Massbase is to make the best use of this budget -- in addition to providing the overarching system design.

Questions to think about:

Structure

Below is a potential (and rough) structure for your essay. You do not need to follow it, but it might be helpful in terms of organising your thoughts:

  1. Introduction
  2. Design considerations (what are the salient aspects of the problem, and what technology currently exists to support them?)
  3. Alternatives (including advantages and disadvantages of each)
  4. Proposed solution (including arguments of why you think it best fits the problem at hand)
  5. Conclusion

Marking guidelines

There is a total of 100 marks available. The marks will be awarded as follows:

Submission

The submission is electronic only and the deadline is Wednesday, 6 November, 4:00 pm.

You will only need to submit a single PDF file of your essay (note: no word documents, or open-document format files). Use the submit program to make the submission. Name your file exc-essay.pdf; you can submit it from the command line as:

submit exc 1 exc-essay.pdf

That is all. For any questions, contact me.

Good luck.
--stratis


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