[linuxkernelnewbies] G22.3250-001 Honors Operating Systems

Wed, 06 May 2009 08:57:56 -0700

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/rgrimm/teaching/sp07-os/

G22.3250-001 Honors Operating Systems

Spring 2007
Class: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3:30-4:45pm, WWH 101
Office hours: Wednesday 2:00-3:00pm, 715 Bdwy., room 711

Robert Grimm
rgr...@cs.nyu.edu

[ Overview | Schedule | Resources ]

Overview

Honors Operating Systems is a graduate course on operating and distributed systems. It covers a wide range of systems research, ranging from historical perspectives to internet-scale services and mobile/pervasive computing. The class has two major components: (1) reading, reviewing, and discussing research papers, and (2) performing a term-long research project. The goals are to expose students to a wide variety of systems research, to provide them with an opportunity to perform systems design and implementation of their own, and to develop their communication skills.

Readings

Readings cover a wide range of research papers and must be completed before the corresponding class. Students also need to write a review for each assigned paper (to make sure everyone keeps up with the readings). Each review should be about a paragraph long and discuss in the student's own words (1) the main idea(s) of each paper, (2) the student's main criticisms (regarding soundness, methodology, presentation, etc.), and (3) relevance to current systems or future research directions. David Wetherall at the University of Washington has written a great guide to reviewing papers.

Reviews are submitted by emailing them in plain-text format (with hard line breaks after each line) to g22_3250_001_s...@cs.nyu.edu. Please make sure the subject specifies the paper title. The archive of all reviews is here. Paper reviews are due at 8am on the day of the corresponding class!

Projects

The goal for the projects is to conduct systems research and gain experience with designing, implementing, and evaluating real systems. Projects are term-long and performed in groups of two or three students. Each group produces a final report, structured like a conference paper, and presents their results at the end of the course. Project ideas will be suggested by the instructor, but students may also to pick their own topics.

To guide project groups through the term, there are several milestones along the way:

  • Project proposal. In about two pages, describe the problem you intend to address and your proposed solution. You should also identify non-goals and resources you need to completing the project.
  • Literature search. In about a page, identify related work and compare it with your own work. This milestone should form the foundation of the related work section of your final paper.
  • Mid-term report. In about five pages, describe what you have achieved so far and the work still left to do. You should also describe problems you encountered and surprising or unexpected issues.
  • Final report. The final report is a full-length paper (of 10-14 pages) and structured like a conference paper. Motivate your work, review related work, describe the design and implementation of your system, and provide an evaluation of its effectiveness. You also need to give the corresponding talk, with 20 minutes for the presentation and 10 minutes for questions.

Exams

There is an open book, take home mid-term, but no final exam.

Prerequisites

Undergraduate operating systems. Additionally, experience with building large software systems and the ability to digest and review research papers are highly helpful.

Grading Policy

Roughly: 50% for readings, class participation, and mid-term, and 50% for research project. Missed reviews, however, will have a disproportionate negative impact on the final grade.

Collaboration Policy

Students are encouraged to discuss class topics and readings with each other. However, each student must write his/her reading review individually. Students in different project groups may help each other with general programming questions. However, students in different groups must not exchange code or use code from outside sources (such as the Internet) without explicit permission by the instructor.

Schedule

  1. Introduction

    • (Jan 16) Overview of the course. Slides.

  2. Historical Perspective

    Further readings:

  3. Structure and Organization

    Further readings:

  4. Managing Concurrency

    Further readings:

  5. Communication

    Further readings:

  6. Virtual Memory

    Further readings:

  7. File Systems

    Further readings:

    • Marshall K. McKusick, William N. Joy, Samuel J. Leffler, and Robert S. Fabry. A Fast File System for UNIX. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 2(3):181-197, August 1984.
    • Chandramohan A. Thekkath, Timothy Mann, and Edward K. Lee. Franigpani: A Scalable Distributed File System. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, pages 224-237, Saint Malo, France, October 1997.
    • Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung. The Google File System. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, pages 29-43, Bolton Landing, NY, October 2003.

  8. Security

    Further readings:

    • Butler W. Lampson. Protection. In Proceedings of the 5th Princeton Symposium on Information Sciences and Systems, pages 437-443, Princeton, NJ, March 1971. Reprinted in ACM Operating Systems Review, 8(1):18-24, January 1974.
    • Andrew C. Myers and Barbara Liskov. Protecting Privacy Using the Decentralized Label Model. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 9(4):410-442, October 2000.
    • Petros Efstathopoulos, Maxwell Krohn, Steve VanDeBogart, Cliff Frey, David Ziegler, Eddie Kohler, David Mazières, Frans Kaashoek, and Robert Morris. Labels and Event Processes in the Asbestos Operating Systems. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pages 17-30, Brighton, UK, October 2005.

  9. Mobile and Pervasive Computing

    Further readings:

    • Lily B. Mummert, Maria R. Ebling, M. Satyanarayanan. Exploiting Weak Connectivity for Mobile File Access. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pages 143-155, Copper Mountain, Colorado, December 1995.
    • M. Satyanarayanan. The Evolution of Coda. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 20(2):85-124, May 2002.
    • Athicha Muthitacharoen, Benjie Chen, and David Mazières. A Low-Bandwidth Network File System. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pages 174-187, Banff, Canada, October 2001.

  1. Extra Topic: Internet-Scale Services

    Further readings:

Resources

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