CS6420 - Operating Systems

Instructor

George Riley
Office: GCATT 225
Office hours: M/W/F 10:30 - 11:30in CoC 215
Email: riley@cc.gatech.edu

Course Summary

CS6420 (Operating Systems) a graduate level course that covers in detail many advanced topics in operating system design and implementation. 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, students are expected to understand the problem that is addressed by the paper, and what the solution is. In many cases, understanding the problem is as important as understanding the solution.

For this course, we will have one simple programming project and two fairly difficult programming projects, requiring an implementaion of some aspect of operating system design using the "C" programming language. Students are expected to be fairly competent in "C", although the instructor and/or the TA can assist with diffuculties in debugging the projects.

There will be no homework assignments. There will be required reading for each class, as outlined in the syllabus below. Between reading papers and programming projects, I did not feel that other homework would be beneficial.

Teaching Philosophy

The syllabus gives the paper to be read and discussed for each class period, and the students are expected to have read the paper prior to class. The class lectures will cover briefly the information presented in the paper, and then we will discuss in detail why things are done in certain ways. I encourage (and expect) you to participate actively in the learning process. In particular, I welcome your comments and questions as we cover material in class. One-way lectures quickly becoming boring, both for you and for me. Also, I have found that students often learn more from other students comments than from the instructor! By asking lots of questions, your understanding of the material will be deepened signficantly, and the course will be much more fun!

Students are also encouraged to help each other via postings on the class newsgroup git.cc.class.6420. If you have difficulty understanding a particular programming assignment or getting some aspect of the programming assignment working, post a newsgroup message. However, there is a fine line between helping someone and doing their work for them. I will read the newsgroup regularly, and if I feel a student has ``stepped over the line'' in helping, I'll let you know.

Teaching/Learning Goals

The purpose of this course is for you to understand the fundamentals of what is happening in a modern operating system when you as a computer user ask the computer to do something for you. Very few of us will actually design or implement an operating system in our careers, but all of us will use a computer frequently, and often things will not work as we expect. A good solid understanding of what is going on inside the computer when your application is misbehaving will enable us to more easily determine what the problem is and what to do about it.

Textbook

None.

Getting Help

There will a teaching assistant for this course. He will do all grading of programming projects, and should be your first point of contact when you have questions about projects or grading. The instructor will be available during office hours (and other times by appointment) to help out as well.

Teaching Assistant: Ashley Taylor ataylor@cc
Office hours: TBA

Grading

Project 1	5%
Project 2	20%
Project 3	20%
Midterm	25%
Final	25%
Class Participation	5%
Total	100%

Posting of Grades

Each student will be assigned an anonymous identifier number, which will be used to post grades on this web page. Thus, you can see how you are doing relative to the other students, and you will be able to determine if you need additional help or effort in the class.

Syllabus

This syllabus is very tentative, and will certainly change over time.

Day	Month	Date	Topic	Reading
Mon	Jun	21	Shared Memory Systems	Mellor-Crummey, J. M. and Scott, M., ``Algorithms for Scalable Synchronization on Shared-Memory Multiprocessors", Pages 1-18, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Feb. 1991.
			Project 1 Assigned
Wed	Jun	23	Shared Memory Systems	Mellor-Crummey, J. M. and Scott, M., ``Algorithms for Scalable Synchronization on Shared-Memory Multiprocessors", Pages 1-18, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Feb. 1991.
Fri	Jun	25	Shared Memory Systems	Anderson, T.E., ``The Performance Implications of Spin-Waiting Alternatives for Shared-Memory Multiprocessors", IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 1, 1, pgs. 6-16, January 1990.
Mon	Jun	28	Shared Memory Systems	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.
Wed	Jun	30	Shared Memory Systems	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.
			Project 1 Due
			Project 2 Assigned
Fri	Jul	2	Shared Memory Systems	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.
			Post-Mortem on Program 1 and Overview of Program 2
Mon	Jul	5	HOLIDAY!
Wed	Jul	7	Distributed Systems (Communication)	Basics on message passing and communication protocols (Silberschatz/Galvin textbook and Tenenbaum textbook).
Wed	Jul	7	Distributed Systems (Communication)	Birrell and Nelson, "Implementing Remote Procedure Calls" ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 2, 1, pgs. 39-59.
Fri	Jul	9	Distributed Systems (Communication)	Birrell, A.D., "Secure Communication Using Remote Procedure Calls", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 3,1, pgs. 1-14, February 1985
Mon	Jul	12	Distributed Systems (Communication)	Von Eicken et. al Active Messages: A Mechanism for Integrated Communication and Computation"
			Distributed Systems (Communication)	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.
Wed	Jul	14	Distributed Systems (Communication)	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.
Thu	Jul	15	Project 2 DUE BEFORE 11:59 PM
Fri	Jul	16	Midterm Exam
Mon	Jul	19	Distributed Systems (Communication)	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.
Mon	Jul	19	File Systems	Anderson, T. et. al., Serverless Network File System, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, February 1996.
			Midterm Answer Key	Midterm Post-Mortem
			Project 3 Assigned
Wed	Jul	21	File Systems	Anderson, T. et. al., Serverless Network File System, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, February 1996.
Fri	Jul	23
Mon	Jul	26	Distributed Systems (Concepts)	Lamport, L., ``Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System", Communications of the ACM, 21, 7, pgs. 558-565, July 1978.
Wed	Jul	28	Distributed Systems (Concepts)	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.
			Memory Management	Freeley et. al. ``Implementing Global Memory Management in a Workstation Cluster'', Fifteenth ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, Dec. 1995.
Fri	Jul	30	File Systems	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, pP. 81-94, December 1991
Mon	Aug	2	Distributed Systems: Failures, Consistency and Recovery	Satyanarayanan, M., et al., ``Lightweight Recoverable Virtual Memory'' The Proceedings of Fourteenth ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, pgs. 146-160, December 1993.
Wed	Aug	4	Distributed Systems: Failures, Consistency and Recovery	David E. Lowell and Peter M. Chen, ``Free Transactions With Rio Vista'', Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles, October 1997.
Thu	Aug	5	Project 3 DUE BEFORE 11:59 PM
Fri	Aug	6	Final Exam Review
Sat	Aug	7	Final Exam, 2:50pm - 5:40pm

Grades

Student ID (anonymous)	Prog 1	Prog 2	Prog 3	Participation	MidTerm	Final	Grade %	Grade Letter
01	90	99	100	5	93	84	93.6	A
02	85	100	90	5	81	78	87.0	B
03	90	98	95	5	95	89	94.1	A
04	100	100	100	5	92	75	91.8	A
05	95	100	100	5	75	88	90.5	A
06	100	100	100	5	86	77	90.8	A
07	100	100	100	4	60	82	84.5	B
08	100	100	100	5	74	68	85.5	B
09	100	98	100	1	78	73	83.4	B
10	100	100	100	5	60	81	85.3	B
11	0	0	0	0	0	0	0.0	0
12	0	0	0	1	0	0	1.0	0
13	100	100	100	0	71	73	81.0	B
14	100	100	100	0	57	56	73.3	C
15	95	100	100	5	79	75	88.3	B
16	100	100	100	1	90	89	90.8	A
17	90	100	100	5	81	52	82.8	B
18	100	100	100	5	87	87	93.5	A
19	85	100	95	5	90	91	93.5	A
20	100	100	97	5	77	72	86.7	B
21	0	0	0	0	0	0	0.0	0
22	100	100	100	5	89	87	94.0	A
23	0	0	0	0	0	0	0.0	0
24	100	100	100	4	70	72	84.5	B
25	100	100	100	0	81	85	86.5	B
26	100	98	100	5	89	86	93.4	A
27	100	100	100	5	53	76	82.3	B
28	0	0	0	5	0	0	5.0	0
29	100	100	100	5	96	93	97.3	A
30	100	100	100	5	86	82	92.0	A
31	80	99	90	3	71	69	79.8	B
32	100	100	100	5	70	54	81.0	B
33	90	100	100	5	81	84	90.8	A
34	100	100	100	5	98	100	99.5	A
35	0	0	0	0	0	0	0.0	0
36	0	0	0	0	0	0	0.0	0
37	100	100	100	5	92	82	93.5	A
38	100	100	90	5	70	78	85.0	B
39	95	100	40	5	63	81	73.8	C
40	100	100	80	5	70	64	79.5	B

Contact Information:

riley@cc.gatech.edu

College of Computing

Georgia Institute of Technology

Atlanta, GA 30332-0280