I was the Teaching Assistant (TA) for CSCI551 Spring 2008. It was a good experience and I recommend this course =P. The instructor is my advisor Prof. John Heidemann.I assure you that you will learn a lot from this course.
My advisor changes the class project every year(exciting, ha?). The class project in Spring 2008 is a simplified implementation of Google's MapReduce Model. See Google's MapReduce paper for more information.