CS261 Course Syllabus

Week	Date	Topic	Reading and Assignments
1	9/3	Course Introduction	None
2	9/8	The Beginning of Timesharing	Corbató: An Experimental Time-Sharing System Dijkstra: The Structure of the "THE" Multiprogramming System
2	9/10	Early Virtual Memory	Kilburn: One Level Storage System Daley: Virtual Memory, Processes, and Sharing in MULTICS
3	9/15	Later Virtual Memory	Rashid: From RIG to Accent to Mach: The Evolution of a Network Operating System Leidtke: On micro-kernel Construction
3	9/17	Multi-processors Then and Now	Tucker: Process Control and Scheduling Issues for Multiprogrammed Shared-Memory Multiprocessors Baumann: The Multikernel: A New OS Architecture for Scalable Multicore Systems
4	9/22	Introduction to Virtual Machines	Assignment 1 due MONDAY, September 21 at 5:00 PM Rosenblum: The Reincarnation of Virtual Machines Creasy: The Origin of the VM/370 Time-Sharing System Bugnion: Disco: running commodity operating systems on scalable multiprocessors
4	9/24	Virtual Machine Commercialization	Waldspurger: Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server Barham: Xen and the Art of Virtualization
5	9/29	The Virtual Machine Debate	Hand: Are Virtual Machine Monitors Microkernels Done Right? Heiser: Are Virtual-Machine Monitors Microkernels Done Right? Roscoe: Hype and Virtue
5	10/1	Quiz and Origins of Journalling File Systems	Quiz #1:History and Virtual Machines Hagmann: Reimplementing the Cedar File System Using Logging and Group Commit
6	10/6	Network File Systems	Project Proposal and Research Plan due Sandberg: Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem Howard: Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System
6	10/8	File Systems and Semantics	Gifford: Semantic File Systems Salmon: Perspective: Semantic Data Management for the Home
7	10/13	File System Dependencies	Project Meetings this week Frost: Generalized File System Dependencies Muniswamy-Reddy: Layering in Provenance Systems
7	10/15	Parallel Storage Systems	Welch: Scalable Performance of the Panasas Parallel File System Eisler: Data ONTAP GX: A Scalable Storage Cluster
8	10/20	Data at Scale	Ghemewat: The Google File System Schroeder: Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You?
8	10/22	Storage, Forensics, and RPC	Beebe: Digital Forensic Implications of ZFS Birrell: Implementing Remote Procedure Calls
9	10/27	Quiz #2 and Early Distributed Systems	Quiz #2: Storage Systems Schroeder: Experience with Grapevine: The Growth of a Distributed System
9	10/29	Distributed Hash Tables	Stoica: Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications Rowstrom: Pastry: Scalable, distributed object location and routing for large-scale peer-to-peer systems
10	11/3	Distributed Services	Project Meetings this week Burrows: The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems Badam: HashCache: Cache Storage for the Next Billion
10	11/5	Content Distribution and Technologies	Peterson: AntFarm: Efficient Content Distribution with Managed Swarms Ledlie: Network Coordinates in the Wild
11	11/10	The Cloud	Dean: MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters Armbrust: Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing
11	11/12	Failure	Rinard: Enhancing Server Availability and Security Through Failure-Oblivious Computing Qin: Rx: Treating Bugs as Software Allergies -- A Safe way to Survive Software Failures
12	11/17	Finding Bugs	Engler: Bugs as Deviant Behavior: A General Approach to Inferring Errors in Systems Code Cadar: Klee: Unassisted and Automatic Generation of High-Coverage Tests for Complex Systems Programs
12	11/19	Security	Krohn: Information Flow Control for Standard OS Abstractions Zeldovich: Securing Distributed Systems with Information Flow Control
13	11/24	Project Presentations	Rough Drafts Due by 5:00 PM
13	11/26	Thanksgiving	None!
14	12/1	A Classic	Quiz #3 Paper Reviews due by 5:00 PM WEDNESDAY 12/2 Lampson: Hints for System Design
14	12/3	Mock Program Committee	Paper Reviews due by 5:00 PM WEDNESDAY 12/2
15	12/8	Reading Period
15	12/10	FINAL PROJECTS	Final projects due at 5:00 PM

BACKGROUND

The following papers are considered background material. Most of them are quick, easy reads and will provide countless bits of wisdom on systems design, doing research, writing papers, and giving presentations. Some are papers you may have discussed in CS161; if you haven't read these, you definitely should as some discussions will assume the knowledge. For the rest, I urge you to read them sooner rather than later.

The papers are listed alphabetically by first author and title.

Abshire: Techniques and Suggestions for Presenters (pdf)
Bentley: The Back of the Envelope (pdf)
Bentley: The Envelope is Back (pdf)
Brooks: No Silver Bullet -- Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering (html)
Day: How to Write a Scientific Paper (pdf)
Ferrari: Considerations on the Insularity of Performance Evaluation (pdf)
Hoare: The Emperor's Old Clothes (pdf)
Lampson: Hints for System Design (pdf)
Lauer: Observations on the Development of an Operating System (pdf)
Levin: An Evaluation of the Ninth SOSP Submissions (pdf)
Roscoe: Writing reviews for systems conferences (pdf)
Saltzer: The Instrumentation of MULTICS (pdf)
Saltzer: End-To-End Arguments in System Design (pdf)
Shoch: The "Worm" Programs - Early Experience with Distributed Computation (pdf)
Small: Does Systems Research Measure Up? (pdf)
Smith: The Task of the Referee (pdf)

Papers we will not cover in class, but which may be appropriate for the first assignment

Brown: Operating System Benchmarking in the Wake of Lmbench: A Case Study of the Performance of NetBSD on the Intel Architecture (pdf)
lmbench: Portable Tools for Performance Analysis (pdf)
D. Patterson: A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) (pdf)

Papers with which I am assuming you are familiar.

McKusick: A Fast File System for UNIX (pdf)

Ousterhout: A Trace-Driven Analysis of the UNIX 4.2BSD File System (pdf)

Ritchie: The UNIX Time-Sharing System (pdf)

Rosenblum: The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System (pdf)