Course Description
CS 6210 (Advanced 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 . Students 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. Some papers are marked reading only . These papers will cover topics that extend or supplement the material in papers that are covered in class. Students will be expected to have some understanding of the results in these papers but will not be tested on them..

Prerequisites

• CS4210 or equivalent undergraduate OS course.
• Should have covered much of Operating Systems Concepts , Silberschatz and Galvin. (or equivalent).
• Good knowledge of Unix and C programming.
• CS4210's prerequisites or equivalents.

Grading

10% class participation / abstracts
35% projects & homework
25% midterm
30% final

Abstracts are due before the paper's presentation in class, and should be turned in via email to the TA. To receive credit for the abstract, emails must have a subject line that includes: 1) the words "6210 abstract", and 2) the last name of the papers primary author. (So for the first paper, the subject should be "6210 abstract bershad ".) Please put the abstract text directly in the email, do not send attachments.

Assume that one paper will be covered each class period, starting with the SPIN paper on 8/21/02. The instructor will confirm the "next paper" at the end of each class period -- if he forgets, please remind him to clarify.
 

Projects & Homework
This course is project intensive and will have a sequence of three to five projects. Strong programming skills are absolutely essential for completing these projects. Students can either do the assigned projects or they can choose to define a project that fits more closely with their individual research goals. Homework may also be assigned. Check here for updates!

• Project I 
• Project II
• Project III 
• Project IV
  
• Special Projects

Papers or references that are not available online will be handed out by instructor, or will be available outside instructors door. Optional supplimentary reference texts include the following:

• Operating Systems Concepts , Silberschatz and Galvin.
• OS: Advanced Concepts , Maekawa, Oldehoeft. Addison-Wesley.
• "Distributed Systems", Sape Mullender, Addison-Wesley.
• "Distributed Operating Systems", Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Prentice Hall.
• "An Introduction to Programming with Threads" , Andrew Burrell.
• Multithreaded Programming with Pthreads, Chapter 4, Bil Lewis, Daniel J. Berg. (handout).

1. Course overview and assumptions, which include basics of operating system structure, micro-kernels, user- and kernel-level threads, synchronization, deadlock detection and avoidance. Refer to Operating System Concepts , Silberschatz and Galvin, and Multithreaded Programming with Pthreads, Chapter 4 ( handout ).

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. Anderson, T.E., " "The Performance of Spin Lock Alternatives for Shared-Memory Multiprocessors ", IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 1, 1, pgs. 6-16, January 1990. (mostly self study , no abstract due )
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. 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.
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. (reference only )
6. 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.

1. Basics on message passing and communication protocols. Refer to Operating System Concepts, Silberschatz and Galvin. Also refer to the web pages of the CoC networking courses.
2. Birrell and Nelson, " Implementing Remote Procedure Calls ", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 2, 1, pgs. 39-59, February 1984. (mostly self study). Also refer to Operating System Concepts, Silberschatz and Galvin.  Abstract due for either this paper or the next, but not both.  Will be covered in the same class period.
3. 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. (mostly self study )  Abstract due for either this paper or the last, but not both.  Will be covered in the same class period.
4. Birrell, A.D., " Secure Communication Using Remote Procedure Calls ", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 3,1, pgs. 1-14, February 1985. (reference only).
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. C.A. Thekkath and H.M. Levy, " Limits to Low-Latency Communications on High-Speed Networks ", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, May 1993.
2. Marcel-Catalin Rosu, Karsten Schwan, and Richard Fujimoto," Supporting Parallel Applications on Clusters of Workstations ", Cluster Computing, Baltzer Science Publishers, May 1998.
3. 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.
4. David Wetherall, `` Active Networks: Vision and Reality: Lessons from a Capsule-based System' ', 17th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, OS Review, Volume 33, Number 5, Dec. 1999.
5. Liu, Kreitz, van Renesse, Hickey, Hayden, Birman, Constable, `` Building Reliable High Performance Communication Systems from Components '', 17th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, OS Review, Volume 33, Number 5, Dec. 1999.

Midterm Exam: Friday, October 4th

Example Midterm

1. 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.
2. Lamport, L., " Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System ", Communications of the ACM, 21, 7, pgs. 558-565, July 1978.

1. SUN NFS, Locus, and Sprite - from Operating System Concepts , Silberschatz and Galvin. (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. (self study )
3. Anderson, T. etc. all., " Serverless Network File System" , ACM Transpaction on Computer Systems, February 1996.
4. M. Satyanarayanan, ``Integrating Security in Large Scale Distributed Systems '', ACM TOCS, Aug. 1989.
5. Feeley, Morgan, Pighin, Karlin, Levy, Thekkath,, " Implementing Global Memory Management in a Workstation Cluster ", Fifteenth ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, Dec. 1995.
6. 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. 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. (Reference only.)
2. Shahabi, Zimmermann, Fu, and Yao.  "Yima: A Second-Generation Continuous Media Server", IEEE Computer Magazine, June 2002.
3. Bolosky, Fitzgerald, and Douceur. "Distributed Schedule Management in the Tiger Video Fileserver"  In Proceedings of the 16th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Oct. 1997.
4. Michael B. Jones, Daniela Rosu and Marcel Rosu, "CPU Reservations and Time Constraints: Efficient, Predictable Scheduling of Independent Activities, " Proceedings of the 16th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '97), St. Malo, France, 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. (Reference only.)
6. 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 .
7. Saito, Bershad, Levy,  "Manageability, Availability, and Performance in Porcupine: A Highly Scalable Cluster-based Mail Service'' , 17th ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, OS Review, Volume 33, Number 5, Dec. 1999.
8. 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. 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, handout).
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.
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. (no abstract due)
5. Omitted: Blasgen et all., " System R: An Architectural Overview" , IBM Systems Journal 38(2/3): 375-396 (1999).
6. 5 Above replaced by: http://www.mcjones.org/paul/recovery.pdf
   

1. Linden, T.A., " Operating System Structures to Support Security and Reliable Software ", Computer Surveys, 8, 4, pgs. 409-445, 1976. Also refer to Operating System Concepts , Silberschatz and Galvin, the chapter on protection. (reference only)
2. Saltzer, J.H., ``Protection and the Control of Information Sharing in Multics '', Communications of the ACM, 17, 7, 1974. (reference only)
3. Cohen, E., and Jefferson, D., "Protection in the HYDRA Operating System", Proceedings of Fifth ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, pgs. 141-160, 1975. (handout)
4. Mitchell, J. G., et al., " An Overview of the Spring System ", Proceedings of Compcon, Feb. 1994.
5. 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.
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. Jason Maassen, Rob van Nieuwpoort, Ronald Veldema, Henri Bal, Thilo Kielmann, Ceriel Jacobs, Rutger Hofman, " Efficient Java RMI for Parallel Programming" , Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Faculty of Sciences, March 2000.
8. 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)
9. Curbera, F.; Duftler, M.; Khalaf, R.; Nagy, W.; Mukhi, N.; Weerawarana, S., "Unraveling the Web services web: an introduction to SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI" , IEEE Internet Computing , Volume: 6 Issue: 2 , March-April 2002, Page(s): 86 -93.
10. Govindaraju, M.; Slominski, A.; Choppella, V.; Bramley, R.; Gannon, D., "Requirements for and evaluation of RMI protocols for scientific computing" , Conference on High Performance Networking and Computing, Proceedings of the 2000 conference on Supercomputing, Dallas, Texas, USA.

Final Exam:  Thursday, December 12th, 2:50-5:40

Graduating students will be given the final examination in dead week. Consult the instructor for details.
Example Final