DSC 204A: Scalable Data Systems

Name: DSC 204A Fall 2025
Author: Hao Zhang

Instructor: Hao Zhang, UC San Diego, Fall 2025

Announcements

Week 5 Announcements

Oct 19 · 0 min read

PA2 has been released, see instruction. The due date is 11/02, 11:59PM.
Reading Summary for week 4 & 5 are due on 10/29.

Week 1

Sep 23

0 No lecture

Sep 26

1 Introduction: Slides • Recording

Survey Beginning of Quarter Survey (Due: End of Week 3 - 10/10)

Readings N/A

Week 2

Sep 30

2 Computer organization, representation of data, floating points: Slides • Recording • Notes

Readings (Due 10/15)

Required: OSTEP Chapter 4
Optional: OSTEP Chapter 6, OSTEP Chapter 7

Oct 2

3 Floating points, processors, memory hierarhcy: Slides • Recording • Notes

Readings (Due 10/15)

Required: OSTEP Chapter 18
Optional: OSTEP Chapter 15, OSTEP Chapter 16

Week 3

Oct 7

4 Cache, OS, scheduling: Slides • Recording • Notes

Readings (Due 10/15)

Required: OSTEP Chapter 22
Optional: OSTEP Chapter 28, OSTEP Chapter 39

Oct 9

5 Memory, cloud computing: Slides • Recording • Notes

Readings (Due 10/15)

Required: Understanding the cloud computing stack: SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS

Week 4

Oct 14

6 Cloud, network basics, collectives: Slides • Recording • Notes

Readings (Due 10/29)

Required: Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing
Optional: The Datacenter as a Computer Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines Chapter 1

Oct 16

7 Collective communication 1: Slides • Recording • Notes

Readings (Due 10/29)

Required: Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing
Optional: The Datacenter as a Computer Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines Chapter 2

Week 5

Oct 21

8 Collective communication 2, data warehouse: Slides • Recording

Readings (Due 10/29)

Required: Design Data-intensive applications, Chapter 3, Page 90 - 101
Optional: Design Data-intensive applications, Chapter 3, the rest

Oct 23

9 Parallelism: Slides • Recording

Readings (Due 10/29)

Required: Google File System
Optional: The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse

Week 6

Oct 28

1 Batch processing, map-reduce: Slides • Recording

Readings (Due 11/12)

Required: MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters
Optional: Delay Scheduling: A Simple Technique for Achieving Locality and Fairness in Cluster Scheduling

Oct 30

2 Streaming processing, RDD, Spark: Slides • Recording

Readings (Due 11/12)

Required: Resilient Distributed Datasets: A Fault-Tolerant Abstraction for In-Memory Cluster Computing
Optional: PowerGraph: Distributed Graph-Parallel Computation on Natural Graphs