TA:  Hao Wu( wh@cc )
Office: CCB 334 (5-1335)
Office hours:  MF 11am-12:30 (Common Area)

Newsgroup: git.cc.class.cs6210

CS6210 (Operating Systems) is a graduate level course that covers in detail many advanced topics in operating system design and implementation.  It starts with topics such as operating systems structuring, multithreading and synchronization and then moves on to systems issues in parallel and distributed computing systems. There is no textbook for this course. Rather, we will read and discuss a number of important research papers which have been published. For each paper that is covered in class, students are expected to gain a solid understanding of the problem that is addressed by the paper, and  the solution proposed by the authors.  Some papers will be assigned for self study.  You must carefully read the self study papers because the understanding of their content may be essential for the papers that will be covered in class. Reading only papers will cover topics that extend  or supplement the material in papers that are covered in class.  The students will be expected to have some understanding of the results  in these papers but they will not be tested on these papers.

This course is project intensive and will have a sequence of  four projects. Strong programming skills are absolutely essential for completing these projects. Students can either do the projects that will be assigned by the instructor or they can choose to define one that has a better fit with their research goals. See the last section of the handout for  information about projects that can be defined by students.
 

•  Programming Project I     (You can read the following report for an introduction to threads programming).

• An Introduction to Programming with Threads, Birrell, DEC Systems Research Center
• Pthreads Tutorial by Phillip Ward Hutto

 
•  Homework I, Due Date 2/15/00

 
•  Programming Project II  (Due Date February 29, 2000)
•  Programming Project III  (Due Date April 4, 2000)
•  Homework II, Due Date 2/15/00(Due Date Tuesday, 4/11/00, In Class)
•  Programming Project IV  (April  20, 2000 (presentation in class))

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Basics (1/11/00)

1. Course overview and assumptions, which include basics of operating system structure, micro-kernels, user- and kernel-level threads, synchronization, deadlock detection and avoidance - see Silberschatz/Galvin, Operating System Concepts.

1. Brian Bershad et al., "Extensibility, Safety and Performance in the SPIN Operating System", Proceedings of the 15th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, December 1995.
2. Dawson R. Engler, Frans Kaashoek and James O'Toole, "Exokernel: An Operating System Architecture for Application-Level Resource Management", Proceedings of the 15th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, ACM, December 1995.
3. J. Liedtke, "On Micro-Kernel Construction", Proceedings of the 15th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, ACM, December 1995.

1. Engler, D.R., Andrews, G.R., Lowenthal, D.K., "Filaments: Efficient Support for Fine-Grain Parallelism", The Univ. of Arizona, Department of Computer Science, TR 93-13a, February 1994.
2. Mellor-Crummey, J. M. and Scott, M., "Algorithms for Scalable Synchronization on Shared-Memory Multiprocessors", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Feb. 1991.
3. Bershad, B.N. Anderson, A.E., Lazowska, E.D., and Levy, H.M., "User Level Interprocess Communication for Shared Memory Multiprocessor", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 9, 2, pgs. 175-198, May 1991.
4. M.S. Squillante and E.D. Lazowska, "Using Processor-Cache Affinity Information in Shared Memory Multiprocessor Scheduling", IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Feb. 1993, pgs. 131-143.
5. Draves, R.P., Bershad, B.N., Rashid, R.F. and Dean, R.W., "Using Continuations to Implement Thread Management and Communication in Operating Systems", Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, pgs. 122-136, December 1991.
6. T.E. Anderson, B.D. Bershad, E. Lazowska, and H. Levy, "Scheduler Activations: Effective Kernel Support for the User-Level Management of Parallelism", Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, pgs. 95-109, December 1991. (reading only)

1. Basics on message passing and communication protocols (refer to networking courses and to Peterson/Galvin).
2. Birrell and Nelson, "Implementing Remote Procedure Calls", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 2, 1, pgs. 39-59, February 1984 (mostly self-study, a brief overview will be presented in class, also see Silberschatz/Galvin).
3. Birrell, A.D., "Secure Communication Using Remote Procedure Calls", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 3,1, pgs. 1-14, February 1985.
4. Schroeder, M., and Burrows, M., "Performance of the Firefly RPC", Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pgs. 83-90, December 1989.
5. Wallach, D.A., Hsieh, W.C., Johnson, K.K., Kaashoek, M.F., and Weihl, W.E., "Optimistic Active Messages: A Mechanism for Scheduling Communication with Computation", Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles & Practice of Parallel Programming (PPOPP), pgs. 217-225, July 1995.

1. Clark, D.D., "The Structuring of Systems Using Upcalls", Proceedings of Tenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pgs 171-180, Dec. 19885. (self study).
2. Hutchinson, N.C., Peterson, L.L., "The x-Kernel: An Architecture for Implementing Network Protocols", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 17, 1, pgs. 64-76, January 1991.
3. C.A. Thekkath and H.M. Levy, "Limits to Low-Latency Communications on High-Speed Networks", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, May 1993.
4. Marcel-Catalin Rosu, Karsten Schwan, and Richard Fujimoto,"Supporting Parallel Applications on Clusters of Workstations", Cluster Computing, Baltzer Science Publishers, May 1998.
5. John Hartman, Larry Peterson, Andy Bavier, Peter Bigot, Patrick Bridges, Brady Montz, Rob Piltz, Todd Proebsting, and Oliver Spatscheck "Joust: A Platform for Liquid Software". IEEE Computer (1999)
6. "CCL: A portable and tunable Collective Communication Library for scalable parallel computers", V. Bala, et.al, in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Vol 6, No 2, Feb 1995.  (reading only)

  Midterm exam in class (3/2)

Distributed Systems: Concepts (3/14-3/16)

1. Lamport, L., "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System", Communications of the ACM, 21, 7, pgs. 558-565, July 1978.
2. Ricart, G. and Agrawala, A.K., "An Optimal Algorithm for Mutual Exclusion in Computer Networks", Communication of the ACM, 24, 1, pgs. 9-17, January 1981.

1. The SUN NFS, Locus, and Sprite - Silberschatz/Galvin, "Operating System Concepts". (self study).
2. Nelson, M.N., Wlech, B.B., Ousterhout, J.K., "Caching in the Sprite Network File System", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 6, 1, pgs. 134-154, February 1988.  Available here.
3. Anderson, T. etc. all., "Serverless Network File System", ACM Transpaction on Computer Systems, February 1996.  Available here.
4. Karlin, A.R., Levy, H.M., and Thekkath, "Implementing Global Memory Management in a Workstation Cluster", Fifteenth ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, Dec. 1995.
5. C. Amza, A. Cox, S Dwarkadas, P Keleher, H Lu, R. Rajamony, W. Yu and W. Zwaenepoel, ``TreadMarks: Shared Memory Computing on Networks of Workstations,'' IEEE Computer, February, 1996.

1. Walker et all., "The LOCUS Distributed Operating System," Procedings of the Ninth ACM Symposium on OPeraitng Systems Principles, pgs 49-70, December 1983 (self study).
2. R. Haskin et. al., "Recovery Management in QuickSilver", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, February 1988.
3. Satyanarayanan, M., et al., "Lightweight Recoverable Virtual Memory", The Proceedings of Fourteenth ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, pgs. 146-160, December 1993 (self-study).
4. David E. Lowell and Peter M. Chen, "Free Transactions With Rio Vista", Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, October 1997.

1. Rangan, P.V. and Vin, H.M., "Designing File Systems for Digital Video and Audio", Proceedings of the Thirteenth ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, pgs. 81-94, December 1991 (self-study).
2. D. James Gemmell, Harrick M. Vin, Dilip D. Kandlur, P. Venkat Rangan, and Lawrence A. Rowe, "Multimedia Storage Servers: A Tutorial", IEEE Computer, May 1995.
3. Henry Massalin and Calton Pu, "Threads and Input/Output in the Synthesis Kernel", ACM 12th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Dec. 1989.
4. Armando Fox, Steven Gribble, Yatin Chawathe, Eric Brewer, and Paul Gauthier, "Cluster-based Scalable Network Services", Sixteenth ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, Oct. 1997.
5. Erik Riedel, Garth Gibson, Christos Faloutsos, "Active Storage For Large-Scale Data Mining and Multimedia," Proc. of the 24th International Conference on Very large Databases (VLDB '98), New York, New York, August 24-27, 1998.
6. Clark and Zhang, "Supporting Real-time Applications in an Integrated Services Packet Network: Architecture and Mechanism", ACM SIGCOMM, 1992.
7. M. Frans Kaashoek, Dawson R. Engler, Gregory R. Ganger and Deborah A. Wallach, "Server Operating Systems," 7th SIGOPS European workshop: Systems suppport for worldwide applications, Connemara, Ireland, September 1996.

1. Linden, T.A., "Operating System Structures to Support Security and Reliable Software", Computer Surveys, 8, 4, pgs. 409-445, 1976. Also see chapter on protection in Silberschatz/Galvin, Operating System Concepts. (reference only).
2. Cohen, E., and Jefferson, D., "Protection in the HYDRA Operating System", Proceedings of Fifth ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, pgs. 141-160, 1975.
3. Mitchell, J. G., et al., "An Overview of the Spring System". (self study)
4. Hamilton, G., Powell, M.L., and Mitchell, J.J., "Subcontract: A Flexible Base for Distributed Programming", Proceedings of the Fourteenth ACM SOSP, pgs. 69-79, December 1993.
5. Birrell, A., Nelson, G., Owicki, S., and Wobber, E., "Network Objects", Digital, SRC Research Report No. 115, Dec. 1995.
6. Wollrath, A., Riggs, R., and Waldo, J., "A Distributed Object Model for the Java System", Usenix Conference on Object Oriented Technologies and Systems, May 1996. (reading only)
7. Aldrich, Dooley, et al., "Providing Easier Access to Remote Objects in Client-Server Systems," 31th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in January, 1998. (reading only)

1. Christian Clemencon, Karsten Schwan, and Bodhi Mukherjee, "Distributed Shared Abstractions (DSA) on Large-Scale Multiprocessors", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, February 1996.
2. M. Ahamad and R. Kordale, "Scalable Consistency Protocols for Distributed Services," IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 1999.
3. Ahmed Gheith and Karsten Schwan, "CHAOS-Arc -- Kernel Support for Atomic Transactions in Real-Time Applications", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, April 1993.

Other Information

1. Text: Papers available online (via the links above) or from instructor.
2. Supplementary Materials: Operating System Textbook used in GT OS undergraduate courses: Operating System Concepts, Silberschatz and Galvin; Advanced Operating Systems text: OS: Advanced Concepts, Maekawa, Oldehoeft. Addison-Wesley. "Distributed Systems", Sape Mullender, Addison-Wesley. "Distributed Operating Systems", Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Prentice Hall.
3. Prerequisites: CS 3431/4431 and its prerequisites or equivalent.
4. Homeworks and projects will be posted  on the course web page. Information related to the course that is of general interest can also be posted in  the course newsgroup git.cc.class.6210.
5. Graduating students will be given the final examination in dead week. Consult the instructor for details.

Grading

45% project/homework (5% for project 1, 10% each for projects 2, 3, and 4, 10% for two homeworks)

25% midterm

25% final

5% class participation


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To propose a special project for this class, I would like from you the following materials:

Brief Project Description

1. purpose of project
2. expected outcome/results
3. at least three different intermediate project steps, with delivery iitems and deadlines for each
4. final project deadline sometime during the week before finals

The second step, typically around midterm time, is having produced much of the software necessary, and having debugged it.

The third step must include not only software testing but also performance evaluation, on whatever platform you choose to use.

The final deliverable not only includes the actual software but also a report, which is outlined next.

Final Report

You are asked to submit an on-line final report regarding your special project  that consists of the following parts:

1. A statement of your approach to the project and the technique used to solve it - two typewritten pages minimum, 8 pages maximum, including a list of references to related work.
2. If applicable, a running program with sufficient documentation so that someone can understand your program without re-running it. Such documentation should consist of detailed comments within the program text and of  explanations on a separate piece of paper. You should be prepared to hand in your program electronically, if requested. Most likely, you will simply schedule a demo with me. (please do so!)
3. A conclusion, stating the main results of your work. This conclusion might contain a performance evaluation of your program or a list of next st.ps concerning it (what might be interesting to do next). How it should be extended, what should be done to make it more useful. Maximum 4 pages, minimum 2 pages.
4. A one page evaluation of what you did: its usefulness in the context of other work AND in the context of general research (namely, why did you do this and why was or wasn't it worthwhile doing?)
5. A one page discussion relating the work you did to the topics we studied in  class. Comment on what papers in class relate to what you did or to extensions of what you did, if applicable.