Course Introduction

In this course, we will learn

• Programming techniques, specifically functional programming, useful for Big Data Systems.
• Basic distributed systems theory, applied on databases and file systems
• “Small” data processing
• Batch processing
• Stream processing
• Graph processing

Tools and technologies

During our course we will learn how to process data with

• Unix, the de-facto standard for small-ish data
• Spark, and related libraries, for batch processing
• Flink for stream processing
• Spark and custom code for graphs

The course will be using the following 2 programming languages

• Bash: for automating data processing
• Scala: the de-facto standard for high performance data processing

Schedule

You can get information about the course schedule here

Grades

• 60% final exam, multiple-choice.
• 40% assignments. 5 assignments, 8% each 4 assignments, 10% each

There will be a resit, there is no mid-term.

You can transfer your assignment grade to the resit AS A WHOLE. No individual assignment resubmissions!

Assignments

• The course consists of 5 4 mandatory assignments. There will be 4 assignments instead of 5 due to circumstances; the assignment about distributed systems has been dropped.

• You always work in pairs: select your team mate!

• Grade: \(\frac{\sum_{assign=1}^{5} grade(assign)}{5}\), aka the mean

  • No submission? Grade \(\rightarrow\) 0
  • Late submission? Grade \(\rightarrow\) 0

• We will use Unix for the first assignment, IntelliJ/Scala for all others.

• Template files are provided on Brightspace

  • Use Maven for assignments 2, 3 and 4 to install all dependencies

Assignment submission

We will use CPM. The course name is CSE2520: Big Data Processing

• You need to signup to enroll and also declare your pairs
• To submit, hit the overview button and select the appropriate assignment
  • Pay attention to the instructions about submitting an assignment. Deviating from these may cause automatic grading to fail
• All the assignments have deadlines
• Feedback and grading is automatic: the results are available on CPM
• Technical support: ask the TAs during the labs or via Mattermost
  • Feedback on CPM is not instantaneous. Do let the TAs know if no feedback appeared after an hour

Need help?

• Lab sessions every Wednesday afternoon
  • All TAs will be around
  • Work together to solve assignments
  • Ask questions about the next assignment
  • Ask questions about your grades
• You are welcome to join the BDP 2020-2021 Mattermost channel.

Rules for using Mattermost

• Fire and forget
  • Don’t expect TAs to answer
  • Don’t expect the course instructors to answer questions
  • TAs and instructors do not work outside business hours
• Mattermost should be mostly used to exchange opinions and ideas
  • Not assignment solutions
• No abusive behaviour (swearing, stalking, threatening, sexism etc) will be tolerated

Slide symbols

• Q A question with a known answer; this will be revealed, but we should work together towards it!

• D A open discussion item; we need to think and discuss.

Lecture notes

• Freely available on the web, on my homepage (http://gousios.org/teaching.html)

• You can print/download them before the lecture and bring them along to make additional notes.

• I am looking forward to improve them! If you have suggestions, find errors etc, let me know!

Bibliography

Copyright

This work is (c) 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 - onwards by TU Delft and Georgios Gousios and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.