Course schedule: Room G50, Monday 2:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.; Wednesday 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
What is this course about?
This course is about the performance of distributed systems, from data centers to the Internet: how fast, how cheap, how reliable they are, and why. We build the mathematical tools to predict how a system behaves and to design and tune it for best performance.
We then turn these tools on questions that matter right now.
Key questions:
How to shrink the carbon, water, and land footprint of AI workloads through spatio-temporal shifting? Take a look here https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167658;
How network tomography reconstructs the hidden internal behavior of a network from nothing but end-to-end measurements? Take a look here https://www.nokia.com/newsroom/nokia-and-orange-france-complete-first-worldwide-live-service-provider-network-tomography-trial-supporting-ai-ready-infrastructure/.
Mor Harcol-Balter, Performance Modeling and Design of Computer Systems, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Research papers will be provided by the professor during the course.