CSC 2227S: Topics in the Design and Implementation of Operating Systems

News

Jan. 28 - Reading list is now available. Please send me email with a list of papers that you would like to present. Note that we have 20 papers and 10 people on my sheet taking the course for credit. That means that someone will have to present the papers for this week. Volunteer early or risk being tapped on the shoulder on Wednesday.

Visit the "Readings" link on the navigation bar for a complete course schedule for this term. Note that this list will not be complete until next week.

Recommended review exercises have been posted on the "Readings" page.

Overview

Course Info Sheet

This course examines the design and analysis of selected aspects of operating systems and distributed systems. It covers topics such as concurrency and distributed communication; fault-tolerance, availability, and persistence; and operating system structure. This is a seminar-style course based on occassional lectures, paper presentations by students, and discussions of readings. The focus is on the principles used in the design of operating systems and distributed systems, and algorithms and data structures used in their implementation. Readings include case studies, seminal papers, and recent conference and journal articles.

General Information

Meeting Time/Place:
Friday 1-3pm, BA 026

Instructor
Angela Demke Brown   BA 5228 946-8080   demke@cs.toronto.edu

Prereqs

Members of this class are expected to have taken an operating systems course equivalent to UofT's CSC 369 and achieved a grade of A or better. This includes familiarity as a user with an interactive operating system (e.g., Unix) and solid understanding of basic concepts in the design and implementation of operating systems. Students without this prerequisite knowledge are likely to struggle.

Some knowledge of advanced OS topics such as are covered in UofT's CSC 469/CSC 2208 is also assumed. In particular, students should be familiar with common OS structuring techniques (e.g. monolithic vs microkernels and virtual machine basics), performance evaluation strategies, synchronization, issues and strategies for 64-bit virtual address spaces, and timing (synchronous vs asynchronous) and failure (fail-stop vs Byzantine) models for distributed systems.

Components

• Occassional lectures by the instructor on core topics.
• Critical study and discussion of recent literature in each of the core topic areas. This will include brief (25-30 minute) presentation of research papers by students and involvement in discussions.
• Summaries of papers.
• A term project that involves designing, constructing, and evaluating an interesting software system related to the problems and techniques discussed in class.

Topics planned

This course will be a broad survey of Operating Systems research, rather than an in-depth study of a particular sub-area. The exact list of topics is still evolving, but will be drawn from the following list (unfortunately, we will not be able to cover all of these):

• Virtual machines: implementations and applications
• File Systems: Performance and Integrity
• Communication Models
• Resource usage accounting
• Multiprocessor Scheduling
• Large-scale memory management
• Fault Tolerance and Reliability
• Language Tools for Systems
• Systems monitoring
• Security: Dilemmas and Mechanisms
• Mobility and Energy Management
• Extensibility and Flexibility
• Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems

Books

There is no assigned textbook. However, there will be a variety of readings that will be available on the web page. The following list of books are available at the E&CS library and may be useful for background reading and deeper study:

• Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems, 2nd ed. (Background), QA 76.76.063T359 2001X
• Silberschatz & Galvin, Operating System Concepts, 6th ed. (Background), QA 76.6.P475 1998
• Coulouris et al., Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design, 3rd ed., QA 76.9.D5C68 2001
• Lynch, Distributed Algorithms, QA 76.9.D5L96 1996
• Lynch et al., Atomic Transactions, QA 76.545.A86 1994
• Bernstein et al., Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems, QA 76.9.D3B48 1987
• Silberschatz et al., Database System Concepts, 3rd ed., QA 76.9.D3K76 1997 (2nd ed. with Korth as first author at Gerstein Library)
• Casevant & Singhal, Readings in Distributed Computing Systems, QA 76.9.D5C35 1994
• Ananda & Srinivasan, Distributed Computing Systems: Concepts and Structures QA 76.9.D5D526 1991
• Mullender, Distributed Systems QA 76.9.D5D5937 1989
• Filman & Friedman, Coordinated Computing: Tools and Techniques for Distributed Software, QA 76.9 D5F55 1984
• Ceri & Pelagatti, Distributed Databases: Principles and Systems, QA 76.9.D3C386 1984X
• Andrews, Concurrent Programming: Principles and Practice. QA 76.642 A53 1991
• Jain, The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis, QA 76.9 E94J32 1991
• Schneier, Secrets and lies: digital security in a networked world, QA 76.9.A25S352 2000X
• Gray & Reuter, Transaction processing: concepts and techniques , QA 76.545.G73 1993

Conferences

These conferences are the major arenas for the publication of new ideas in computer systems research:

• SOSP - Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
• OSDI - Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation
• FAST - Conference on File and Storage Technologies
• IEEE S&P - Security & Privacy
• Usenix Security
• ACM CCS - Computer and Communications Security
• ASPLOS - Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
• SIGCOMM - Computer Communication
• SIGMETRICS - Computer/communication system performance
• USENIX Annual Technical Conference
• ISCA - International Symposium on Computer Architecture
• HotOS - Hot Topics in Operating Systems Workshop

Grading

• 55% project
• 20% paper summaries
• 20% paper presentations
•   5% class discussion

Final Note

* Everything here is subject to change.