Nicole Hamilton
Lecturer III (retired)
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
This is an archive of my lecture videos and other materials from winter 2021, when I taught the course via Zoom during the pandemic. Contact me if you'd like copies of any of the original PowerPoint or other files.
This was the fourth time I taught the course but the first and ironically last with its new permanent course number 440.
This was a course in how to tackle a large system programming project in C++. Students worked on a team of 6 to write a complete multithreaded internet search engine from scratch.
My objective was to offer students an opportunity to work on a significant relatable project (something you can explain to your family and to recruiters) early in their undergraduate careers. I wanted 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.) To open it to sophomores, I deliberately set EECS 281 as the only prereq, though that meant the course would have to cover both the OS topics and the search engine internals.
I intended for the workload to be consistent with any other 4-unit EECS course and students reported on the evals that that tended to be true. Engines typically ran 6 to 10 KLOC (thousand lines of code). Every semester, a few teams would decide to crush it with very sophisticated engines running 14 to 20 KLOC. The first time, most indices were pretty small, perhaps a few a few thousand documents. The last two times, the top teams indexed over 500M documents, crawling with thousands of threads spread over a half dozen or more AWS machines.
The first time around, 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. Obviously, some teams did better than others, but every semester, every team successfully built and demonstrated a working engine.
The supporting statement I submitted when requesting the permanent course describes the evolution of the course.
