• Instructor: Ada Gavrilovska, CCB 222, 404 894 0387
  
ada@cc
Office Hours: M: 10:30-11:30, W: 1:00-2:00, or by appointment

Teaching Assistant: Gagan Goel
gagan.goel@cc
Office Hours: T: 3:00-4:00, Th: 2:30-3:30, CoC Commons Area
 
• Suggested Textbooks:

- Operating Systems Concepts, Silberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne, Sixth Edition, John Wiley and Sons
- Multithreaded Programming with Pthreads, Lewis and Berg, Prentice Hall
- Pthreads Programming Nichols, Buttlar, Farrell, O'Reilly
- Distributed Systems, Tanenbaum and Van Steen, Prentice Hall
 
• Syllabus

 
• Class Newsgroup:
  news://news.cc.gatech.edu/git.cc.class.cs4210

 
• Assignments:
  
  • Homework 1 -- due Monday 6/6 @9:20am
  • Project 1 -- due Friday 6/17 @11:59pm -- work ALONE
  • Homework 2 -- due Monday 6/20 @9:20am
  • Project 2 -- due Friday 7/8 @11:59pm (handouts)
  • Homework 3 -- due Friday 7/15 @9:20am
  • Project 3 -- due Monday 7/25 @11:59pm
  • Homework 4 -- due Wed. 7/21 @9:20am

• Mon May 16: Introduction, Silberschatz and Galvin Chapter 4 (review)
• Wed May 18: Birrell "An Introduction to Programming with Threads"
• Fri May 20: Birrell, continued
• Mon May 23: Implementation of Concurrency and Synchronization (Lewis&Berg Ch.5 and 6)
• Wed May 25: Concurrency and Scheduling, continued
  Thread Design Patterns (Lewis&Berg Ch.13, Nichols, et al. Ch. 2).
• Fri May 27: Intro to Pthreads (Thread creation example, Producer/Consumer example)
• Mon May 30: Memorial Day - no class
• Wed Jun 1: Kernel thread implementation (Eykholt et al. paper on Multithreading the SunOS kernel)
• Fri June 3: --
• Mon Jun 6: User-level thread library implementation discussion (Stein and Shah "lightweight threads" paper).
• Wed Jun 8: First-class user-level threads paper
• Fri Jun 10: High-level synchronization mechanisms: serializers and path expressions. (Bloom's SOSP paper).
• Mon Jun 13: --
• Wed Jun 15: Synchronization constructs continued: Serializers, Path Expressions, RWLocks, and Semaphores
• Fri Jun 17: Performance of Spinlock Alternatives for SMPs (Anderson's paper).
  Project 1 DUE at midnight
• Mon Jun 20: Anderson paper, continued. Midterm Review.
  Homework 1 DUE by class time
• Wed Jun 22: MIDTERM.
• Fri Jun 24: Midterm discussion.
  Webserver Architecture discussion ("Flash: an Efficient and Portable Web Server", by Pai et al). See also the talk slides.
• Mon Jun 27: Webserver Architecture continued. Apache model (Tanenbaum and Van Steen 11.1).
• Wed Jun 29: User-level IPC for SMPs (Bershad et al. paper).
• Fri Jul 1: Implementing Remote Procedure Calls.
• Mon Jul 4: Independence Day - no class
• Wed Jul 6: Sun RPC tutorial (handouts given in class). discuss IPC/RPC.
• Fri Jul 8: Advances in RPC (asynchronous RPC, Java RMI); A Note on Distributed Computing by Waldo, Wyant, Wollrath, Kendall.
  A Distributed Object Model for the Java System" - Java RMI paper
• Mon Jul 11: Micro-kernels (Liedtke's "On micro-kernel construction").
• Wed Jul 13: micro-kernel wrap-up. microkernels vs. extensible OS.
  Reference papers: Exokernel, SPIN, Synthetix
• Fri Jul 15: Fast IPC/doors ("The Spring Nucleus, a Micro-kernel for Objects")
  Reference paper: Spring Overview
• Mon Jul 18: Distributed File Systems (Tanenbaum Ch. 10 (2002 edition), Silberschatz and Galvin Ch. 17).
• Wed Jul 20: Distributed File Systems (continued)
• Fri Jul 22: Distributed File Systems case studies: The Sprite file system (recommended paper: Caching in the Sprite Distributed File System by Nelson et al.)
• Mon Jul 25: Distributed Shared Memory (Tanenbaum, Ch. 6.2)
  Reference paper: Distributed Shared Memory: Concepts and Systems
• Wed Jul 27: DSMs and memory consistency models
• Fri Jul 29: Semester wrap-up. Review.


• Wed. Aug 2: FINAL EXAM, 2:50-5:40pm, Rm CoC 102

Pointers to Technical Information:

• Pthreads Resources:
• news://comp.programming.threads
• Threads FAQ
• LinuxThreads (this has long been the standard Pthreads package distributed with Linux, but with latest kernels new support has been added and different libraries take advantage of it for better performance). Here is a good overview of the state-of-the-art in Linux Pthreads support.
• Next Generation POSIX Threading (a recent Linux Pthreads library)
• The GNU Pth Portable Threads package
• HTTP, Web Servers, and more:
• HTTP specification
• micro_httpd: a tiny HTTP server
• Socket programming tutorial, and an example.
• JPEG manipulation:
• www.ijg.org
• Source code library for JPEG manipulation (follow installation instructions to compile it)
• Client program using the library to create low-quality JPEG images from regular JPEGs. Untar together with the library and follow the instructions in README.lowres

Additional Information:

• Old Midterms:
  • Midterm 1
  • Midterm 2
  • Midterm 3
• Old Finals:
  • Final 1
  • Final 2
• Some previous offerings of this course:
• Spring 2004
• Spring 2003
• Spring 2002
• Spring 2001
• Spring 2000
• Fall 1999
• Previous offerings of the quarter version of this course:
• Fall 98 Ahamad
• Winter 99 Ramachandran
• Spring 99 Ramachandran
• See the course proposal for what this class is supposed to look like.