This semester is my second as a TA for CS462 - Large Scale Distributed System Design. My graduate advisory, Phil Windley, asked me to be a TA again a month ago or so, and we started talking about things we'd like to do different. We came up with a pretty cool plan.

I took the class myself as an undergrad, and enjoyed it very much. The cream of the class was the lectures, but I found that not everyone learns the way I do. Many focused on the labs for their learning. For a few semesters now, the class labs have been focused on using Enterprise Java Beans with Tomcat and JBoss. These tools certainly can be used for creating the very systems the class studies, but we only had time in one semester to dabble in the technology. Many students seemed to get mired down in the details of using EJBs (of which there are many) and seemed to loose sight of the possibilities that the class was presenting.

We started musing about actually creating a system like the systems we drew on the board during lectures. We formulated some plans, and Dr. Windley spoke with some contacts in the Amazon Web Services division. They agreed to sponsor the project, so it looks like we are going to give it a shot.

We will be building a layered system, with a web server layer, an application server layer, a persistence layer, and the use of queues to manage client software for human use. We plan to use EC2, S3, SQS, Akismet, and Twitter. Each student will have the opportunity to create each piece of the system, hopefully enabling them to gain a full grasp of the architecture and techniques that we use.

I'll be posting more about the project as it progresses, with two main topics in focus. First, I'm very interested to see how the technology side of things works out. Creating a system such as we are planning has only recently been made possible for those of us on a budget. Second, I'm very interested in the students that will be working on this project. I'm curious to see just how much we can do in a single semester of an undergraduate program. I think it will be a fantastic experience for those involved, and I'm looking forward to their feedback.