Topics:

Memory hierarchies:
  Techniques for reducing miss rate such as
  associativity, memory organization, etc. (Chapter 7 of P&H)

I/O:
  I/O devices: (Ch 8 of P&H, Ch 12.1-12.3 of S&G))
  disks, and disk controllers,
  DMA, programmed I/O, interfacing devices to CPU,
  networks, network adaptors,

  Device drivers and file systems:
  disk scheduling (Ch 13 of S&G),

  flow control and buffer management,
  device drivers, (Ch12.4 - Ch 12.6 of S&G),

  file layout, directories, naming,
  (Ch 10, Ch 11, and Ch 21.7 of S&G),

Parallel Systems:
  machine classes: SMP, SIMD, MIMD, shared memory, and distributed memory,
  multiprocessor caches, (Chapter 9 of P&H)

  Parallel OS and parallel programming:
  threads, and threads packages (Ch 4.5 of S&G),

  concurrency and synchronization: mutual exclusion locks, barriers,
  threads implementation, upcalls (Ch 6.3, 6.4, and 6.8 of S&G),


Networking and distributed systems:
  Networking hardware: routers, LAN, WAN,
  interfacing the computer to LAN and WAN,
  protocols and distributed systems: IP, TCP, UDP,
  remote procedure call,
  socket programming,
  distributed services: RLOGIN, FTP, MAIL, TELNET,
  (Ch 15 & 16 S&G)