Computer system engineering

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1 hour / session

Recitations: 2 sessions / week, 1 hour / session

Tutorials: 1 session / week, 1 hour / session

6.004 Computation Structures and 6.005 Software Construction or 6.009 Fundamentals of Programming

After completing this class, the students will be able to design their own distributed systems to solve real-world problems. The ability to design one's own distributed system includes an ability to argue for one's design choices.

This primary objective is supported by a few others:

Because this is a Communication Intensive in the Major (CI-M) class, students will also learn to communicate in forms that are common in the field of computer systems. This includes written design reports, oral presentations, and peer review.

The communication instruction also supports the primary learning objective of designing systems. In the real world, we design systems in teams, and communication of many forms (written, oral, etc.) is part of that process.

Saltzer, Jerome H. and M. Frans Kaashoek. Principles of Computer System Design: An Introduction, Part I. Morgan Kaufmann, 2009. ISBN: 9780123749574. [Preview with Google Books]

The text supplements the lectures and recitations; it should be your first resource when you are confused by a lecture topic, or want more information.

Part II of the textbook is available on MIT OpenCourseWare.

The course has three components: lectures, recitations, and tutorials. We expect you to attend all three, as they each serve a different purpose.

Lectures are held on Mondays and Wednesdays for one hour. The lectures are designed to teach students the technical details necessary to design their own systems and to put those details in larger contexts: both the contexts of a specific area of systems as well as systems in general.

This type of material appears in lectures because that's what lectures are good at: giving a higher-level context for the details of the class.

Recitations are held on Tuesdays and Thursdays for one hour. For the first recitation, attend whichever one you want. After that, you will be assigned a permanent section.

Recitations are designed to give students a chance to practice their system-analysis and oral communication skills. Each recitation revolves around a particular paper in systems. Through reading these papers, students get a better sense of how communication in the field is done. Recitations are discussion-based; students get practice analyzing, critiquing, and communicating about systems.

Writing tutorials are held on Fridays for one hour. We will assign you timeslot during the first week of classes.

Most of these tutorials will teach the communication theory and practices of this course and assist you in preparing for the assignments. You'll become fluent in a variety of communication genres, develop strategies and skills needed to present technical concepts to different audiences, learn how to use writing to develop and deepen your technical understanding—and get specific, directed instruction on writing and presenting your assignments. A handful of the tutorials will be dedicated to discussing the design project.

You must hand in assignments when they are due, and you must attend quizzes at the scheduled times. If you feel you have a compelling reason for not handing in an assignment on time, or for not attending a quiz, please talk to Dr. LaCurts in advance.

The only exception to this late policy is design project materials. For those, the late policy will be explicitly posted on each assignment.

If you miss an assignment deadline, you should still hand in the assignment; we'll give you feedback even though we won't give you credit for your final grade. Furthermore, doing assignments is the best way to prepare for exams and design project. Unless otherwise specified, assignments are due at 5:00pm on their assigned due-date.

Each assignment supports the objectives of the class in various ways.

The staff has worked with the MIT Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP) program for more than 10 years to design the writing and speaking assignments. We have chosen assignments that are similar to the kinds of writing you will do in the engineering workplace: Preliminary reports, final reports, and presentations. Communication assignments are designed to help you conceptualize and develop the design project.

The DP requires you to develop a detailed system design to solve a real-world problem. This project will extend over most of the semester, and will be done in teams of three students, all of whom attend the same writing tutorial (with exceptions only for extenuating circumstances). Real-world systems are not built individually; it's always a team effort. Part of the DP is to learn to work productively and effectively in this setting. We will give you tools for doing so in the writing tutorials.

The DP consists of multiple deliverables: a preliminary report, oral presentation, final report, and peer review. The Design Project page gives more detail about the DP deliverables.

These critiques will be graded by your Teaching Assistants (TAs) and/or Communication Instructors and assigned a letter grade (we will specify more details about grading in each of the assignments). The expectations for each individual critique will be detailed in the tutorials. As your skills at analyzing and reading technical papers improve throughout the semester, we will expect your critiques to reflect that.

We will assign the participation grade in two parts: one for the first half of the semester, one for the second half of the semester. We will also give you preliminary grades for each of these (one about a quarter into the semester, one about three quarters into the semester), so that you know where you stand and have time to improve. This document explains in more detail how your participation grade is determined.

Communication Participation: A portion of your participation grade will also be based on your participation in writing tutorials and on your understanding of communication concepts and skills, as demonstrated by your work on the design project and evaluated by your communication instructor.

Note that over a third of your grade comes from written assignments; we expect you to take writing seriously in this class.

The class consists of three components: technical material, communication/system design and analysis, and participation. Each of these components comprises roughly one third of your grade, according to the following breakdown:

Technical Material

30% for Quizzes (two @ 15% each)

5% for Hands-Ons

10% for Design Project (DP) Preliminary Report and Presentation

20% for DP report

4% for DP Peer Review

6% for Critiques (Critique #1 =2%, Critique #2 = 4%)

20% for Recitation Participation

5% for Communication Participation

You must complete all design project assignments in order to pass 6.033. If you do not, you will automatically receive an F.

You may not collaborate on quizzes. On hands-ons, it's okay to discuss ideas with your classmates, but you should not be collaborating on the actual answers. Take the UNIX hands-on for example: it's okay to talk to your classmates about what pipes are, it's not okay to work together to come up with a command that gives a long listing of the smallest given files in the /etc directory whose name contains the string ".conf", sorted by increasing file size (i.e., the solution to one of the first questions).

On all writing assignments you are welcome to discuss ideas with others, but your writing should be your own and you should acknowledge all contributions of ideas by others, whether from classmates or from papers you have read.

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