• Winter 2019

• Syllabus
• First assignment Group photos
• Stylesheet

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• Winter 2018

• Student evaluations summary report
• Student evaluations individual responses
• Reflections

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• My faculty page
• Free Hamilton C shell download for UMich students and faculty

Nicole Hamilton

Lecturer III
Computer Science and Engineering
University of Michigan
2649 Beyster
2260 Hayward Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2121

C: 425-765-9574
nham@umich.edu
https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~nham

Bio

I've spent most of my career as a system designer on new product teams and as an entrepreneur selling Hamilton C shell, a product I wrote in my living room 30 years ago.

In early 2003, I became the ninth dev on the team that created what became the Bing engine. I wrote the ranker, the part that orders the results, and the query compiler, that part that decides what the user is looking for. Overall, I contributed about 30 KLOC to the first release, representing about 10% of all the code in the backend as of the time we went live.

I never expected to be teaching at a university. I feel lucky to be here.

EECS 398 System Design of a Search Engine
Winter 2019

Lectures
Dow 1014, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Lectures will be recorded but attendance is strongly advised.

Office hours
Beyster 2649
Monday through Thursday, 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm

Prerequisites
EECS 280 and 281

Classification
Depending on your major:
CSE and CE:  MDE or CS Flex Tech
CS-LSA:  Capstone or CS Flex Tech
EE:  Technical elective
DS:  Advanced Technical or Flex Tech elective

Overview

This is a course in how to tackle a large system programming project in C++. You’ll work on a team of 6 to write a complete multithreaded internet search engine from scratch.

My objective is to offer students an opportunity to work on a significant relatable project (something you can explain to your family and to recruiters) early in your undergraduate careers. I want the experience to be like working on the startup dev team for a new product (like the one I had on the startup team for what became the Bing engine.)

Sixty percent of your grade will be on the project and will be competitive, based mostly on your team’s performance compared to the others and on your individual contribution to your team. Thirty percent of your grade will be on the exams. Ten percent is homework.

System design

System design projects always seem to have some defining characteristics.

1. There’s an important domain-specific part that asks you to learn something new about an interesting problem you’ve never seen before, in this case, how a search engine works.

2. There’s a need to invent a solution, an architecture, breaking the problem down into lots of moving parts, with lots of data structures and algorithms.

3. It’s usually “close to the metal” with lots of low-level OS calls everywhere and the need to define file and interchange formats, perform handshakes, share resources using locks, deal seriously with error recovery, etc.

4. They're usually team efforts because they're too big to do any other way.

5. You build the whole thing, often from scratch, and at the end, you get to see it work and it feels good.

Every new design project always has a new domain-specific part, which keeps a career in system design interesting, but the rest of the skills are the same and they’re things most people learn by doing.

What I like about a search engine as a case study in system design is that it’s really compact fun project that hits on every bit of what, to me, system design is all about.

Results from last time

This will be the second time for this course. The engines submitted last time ranged in size from about 4.2 to just over 14 KLOC; most were about 6 KLOC. (Yes, a little smaller than you might have guessed.) Sounds easy (maybe) but you will deal with a lot more ambiguity than in most classes, in part because the course is still so raw and under construction.

Last time, the big risk was whether an entire engine could be scaled down into a project that a small team of undergraduates could finish in one semester, especially as I'd never tried this before and I was starting with zero course content. But (tada!) every team successfully built and demonstrated a working engine. (It needs to be said: Michigan students are amazing.) But as anyone can see from the evals, there was a lot of needs improvement, which I hope to improve this time.

This time, I'm not starting from scratch and I'll have some help. Expect more content, more structure, better guidance on the project, better communication of what's expected. But I'll still be creating parts of it on-the-fly, pedaling as fast as I can.