Datacenter Design and Operations

Offered by partner university Avignon Université

This course is meant to provide an introduction to datacenter technologies. It addresses the properties of datacenter computing and networking infrastructures, and provides elements on the management of computing and networking resources therein. It introduces the fundamental problems of scheduling tasks on multiple machines. Additional elements to be covered are datacenter networking, hyper-converged architectures, security and SLAs in cloud computing.

Dates

Online Meetings 2026:

Monday, March 16
Wednesday, April 8
Tuesday, May 5
All sessions take place at 17:00

Online Exam:

Wednesday, June 3, 2026

Laboratory Sessions:

Laboratory sessions will be held remotely.

Software: MATLAB

Data center architecture: history of data centers; data center structure. Datacenters and constructive metrics: energy, robustness, and load distribution.
Datacenter networks: learn the main network architectures in datacenters, and the roles of SDN controllers for dynamic routing. Learn flow scheduling techniques in data center networks, particularly for the problem of scheduling flows and coflows.
Allocation of computing resources in data centers. Distributed computing applications and resource allocation. Migration models and hot/cold models. Caching and registries.
Introduction to scheduling theory. Classification of scheduling problems. Scheduling for one machine. Scheduling for several machines. Scheduling with deadlines.

The practical part of the course is devoted to practical exercises in implementing resource management techniques in datacenters: