This course is a special topics course. The topic and syllabus will change each time the course is offered, reflecting the interests of the instructor. Typically the course will survey new research in the topic area but may also look back at canonical and ground breaking work from the past. Example course topics might include things such as web operating systems, global file systems, distributed object-based systems, fault tolerance/distributed check pointing, high-speed networking, network security, active networking, group communication models, compilers for parallel/distributed computing, recent programming languages, and data mining.