Foundations of Modern Data Systems

The goal of this course is to familiarize students with the modern hardware stack present in clouds and datacenters. This is an important goal because, to be able to build and maintain efficient data processing systems (e.g., database management systems, streaming analytics pipelines, machine learning training, etc.), an in-depth understanding of the modern hardware is necessary. Even though most students probably covered some of the topics in this lecture partially in other lectures during their studies, this lecture provides a complete view of the hardware architecture and programming aspects from a software systems aspect and how to utilise them best. In the lecture, we will cover a wide spectrum of hardware which is used today in cloud data centres such as: multi-core and multi-socket CPUs flash-based storage stacks user-space networking RDMA and programmable networks GPUs and specialized hardware-based accelerators In addition to the in-depth presentation of how these hardware components are designed and how they work, the students will also acquire hands-on experience in programming for them in several coding labs as part of the lecture.