Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Google class at UW CS

Laurie Burkitt at the Seattle PI reports that Googler Christophe Bisciglia is directing a "Google 101" class in the Computer Science department at University of Washington. The class explores programming and problem solving on massively parallel distributed systems (such as the one Google happens to have).

The class is actually called CSE 490h. The lecture slides and class tutorials are publicly available.

Of particular interest may be Lecture 3 on MapReduce (PPT), the notes in "Introduction to Distributed Systems" (PDF), and Lecture 4 on GFS and distributed systems (PPT).

Also, the tutorial on Hadoop and the Hadoop mini-wiki may be useful for those who might want to try some of this out on their own cluster using the open-source clone of MapReduce, Hadoop.

Looks like a fun class!

[Seattle PI article found via John Cook and Barry Schwartz]

6 comments:

Adam MacBeth said...

Thanks for tracking this down!

Andrew Hitchcock said...

I got an e-mail about this article from one of the department people today:

"The parts I'm familiar with are totally wrong, so probably the other parts are too. But hey ..."

That said, I think it is being offered next quarter and I'd really like to take it. It looks like it is only being offered for 15 students, so my chances are probably low. I've read about the Hadoop software before, but I don't have a cluster to test it on, so this might provide some interesting opportunities.

Greg Linden said...

Hi, Andrew. I think the class is well underway already. See the course page (CSE 490h).

Andrew Hitchcock said...

I got an e-mail from one of the advisers today saying registration for 490h ("the 'Google' class") will open in a few days, so I think it is being offered again next quarter as well.

Isaacy said...

I wonder if they allow auditing as well.

head of the table said...

ya, christophe doesn't get weekly pedicures. Though he tells me he's made it a point to tell his coworkers that he's getting his nails buffed twice a week. Good sense of humor, clever guy. He never could get me interested in computers though.