Successful Systems in Production Graduate Teaching

This paper presents our experience in coordinating and teaching a novel graduate systems and computing course named “Successful Systems in Production” (SSP). The course targets graduate students of different research interests in Computer Science. The course aims at giving a breadth knowledge on cutting-edge well-known systems in production, and exploring the potential synergies across different areas of research. Having its roots in Distributed Computing, SSP addresses those systems that overlap with other research areas like Computational Systems, Parallel Computing, Databases, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Security, etc. SSP exhibits an agile topic selection model that fits several students’ backgrounds in each academic year. The topics focus on the practical aspects of each selected system that is considered “successful”, i.e., based on its worldwide impact and technical significance. This is important for graduate students to acquire best practices in industry and academia, necessary to build practical computing systems. In the same vein, the assessment method includes a project that is based on one of the presented systems and also intersects with the student’s own research plan. Based on our teaching experience and the excellent feedback of the students, we strongly recommend this graduate course to be taught at other universities.