Course Overview

The course focuses on the complex technological infrastructures being deployed nowadays. Particular emphasis will be given to the role of their hardware and software components and to the issues related to performance and Quality of Service (QoS). The course will introduce the techniques and tools for analyzing and predicting the performance of the infrastructures and discuss some case studies.
At the end of the course, students will have enough competence to identify the components that limit the performance of complex technological infrastrustures.

Detailed topics:

  • Enterprise digital infrastructure: definitions and requirements.
  • Quality attributes: dependability, performance, usability.
  • Monitoring: objectives, target and process. Benchmarking.
  • Network applications: client/server and peer-to-peer architectural models.
  • Web and HTTP. Web caching. Content Distribution Networks.
  • Domain Name System: basic services and organization.
  • Email: SMTP, POP3, IMAP4 protocols.
  • Modelling approach: definitions, parameterization and evaluation.
  • Operational analysis.
  • Queueing network models.
  • Simulation techniques.
  • Case studies.