Assignment 1: Developing a Chat Server (which will be part of a interconnected network)

In this assignment the focus is to build a chat server that can support multiple forums. Users can (de)register to multiple forums. The chat server should support clients developed by your classmates. It should be possible to create a network of the chat servers that each of you have developed, and use these chat servers to relay messages across the federated chat server network. The wire formats for these messages are described in detail here.

Due on Sep 22nd: This assignment will be tested in class. All of you will be required to startup your chat-servers and your client. Chat server will be inter-connected based on the topology specified in class: each Chat Server will be connected to at least 4 other Chat Servers. Next, clients will generate messages to chat forums with a specific time-to-live (TTL). Messages should be duplicate-detected based on the traces, and discarded when the TTL reduces to 0. The routing (and discarding of messages) combined with the traces in the messages will determine scoring.

Assignment 2: Building a distributed, replicated and fault-tolerant file system
Due on October 20th @ 2:00 pm: As part of this assignment we will be building a distributed file system (very similar to the Google File System) from commodity desktops. A given file will be split into chunks that will be distributed across a set of commodity desktops. During the creation of a file, it should be possible to specify a specific redundancy level. The file system needs to respond to node failures by making sure that a certain number of replicas for a chunk continues to be available. The design needs to incorporate support for random writes/deletes to these files in addition to appends. Include data on whether any of your chunks have gaps in them, and are thus not byte-wise identical with other chunk replicas. Details about this assignment are available here.

Other instructions:

1. Each assignment will need to work with at least 10 chunk servers. The number of machines N for the test will be specified during the scoring.

2. You can use a third-party library for the cryptographic checksum for chunk slices.

3. All other software will be developed by you from scratch.

4. Scoring for the assignment will be done based on a one-on-one interview/demonstration of all the features outlined in the assignment. You will be asked to a code walk-through of specific sections of your code.

Assignment 3: Splicing a physical machine into virtual machines, and building a private cloud to launch a cryptographic attack to retrieve the secret AES key

Due on Nov 12th @2:00 pm: As part of this assignment we will be splicing a physical machine's capabilities (CPU, main memory, hard disk and networking) to create multiple virtual machines. One (or more) of the virtual machines that are created will be part of a private cloud that would be used to run distributed programs. You will be asked to reason about apportioning the available execution pipelines on a CPU. Is there a difference in the performance of virtual machines that have a hardware-assist from the CPU?

As part of this assignment you will be launching a cryptographic attack to retrieve a secret key. Each of you will be given a plain-text, encrypted-text and a cryptographic key search space. You will use this information to launch the attack and retrieve the key. The solution to the assignment is submitting the complete AES cryptographic key. You will run your program on a machine with only one OS, and one with 5 concurrent OS running under Xen. Your report should reason about the differences you see in performance. Also, estimate the number of machines that you will need to launch an unassisted cryptographic attack; for the purposes of your calculation assume that your machine will have 1024 cores, with 4 execution pipelines per core. Details about this assignment are available here.