CS 736: Advanced Operating Systems
Spring 2002

Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau,
office hours: Tuesday (1:30 - 2:30), Wednesday (2:30 - 3:30)
office: 7375 Computer Sciences

Short-cuts

• Class Mail Archive
• Reading questions
• Summary
• Administration
• Reading
• Projects
• Grading
• Resources

News

• [Tue Apr 23 13:15:42] A sample final exam is available. Remember, the final will cover papers from Resource Containers, Virtual Memory, File Systems, and Encryption. The final is closed note and closed book.
• [Tue Apr 2 13:06:59] A sample good report for the warm-up project is available.
• [Sun Mar 17 15:57:04] A sketch of good answers for the midterm is now available.
• [Thu Mar 7 11:13:16] A sample midterm is now available -- answers will not be made available.
• [Wed Feb 13 11:36:14] The list of suggested projects is now available. Initial project meetings will be Friday, Feb 22nd.
• [Wed Feb 13 09:52:42] The slides used in lecture to discuss Gray-Box Systems are available here
• [Mon Jan 28 16:22:19] Your warm-up project on OS measurement is now available from here. It is due in two weeks: Monday, February 11th.
• [Tue Jan 15 11:50:00] Course enrollment is currently closed. If you were not able to register, but are interested in taking the course, you should show up to the first day of class. The following priority will be given to students: CS graduate students, ECE graduate students, then all other students. See here for more details. I will try to let all first-year CS graduate students enroll.
• [Tue Jan 15 11:50:00] This page is under construction. All information here is tentative until the first day of class.
• Old news is kept here.

Summary

Administrative Details

Lecture:
time: 1:00 - 2:15 p.m.
days: Monday, Wednesday, Friday
place: 101 Psychology

Note that class is scheduled to meet for an hour and 15 minutes, but we have the Monday, Wednesday, Friday slot. Thus, we only have to meet on average, two out of the three days. Throughout the semester we will meet on different days; I've scheduled more meetings early in the semester so that you will have more time at the end of the semester to work on your projects. Although a tentative schedule is posted on this page, you must keep 1 - 2:15 free on all Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays throughout the semester, in case I change the schedule.

TA:
Vijayan Prabhakaran
e-mail: vijayan@cs

Prerequisites:
We assume that you have taken an undergraduate operating system course, such as CS537. In CS736, we will assume that you are incommand of this material and we will absolutely not review undergraduate content. If you are unsure of your background, please come and talk with me.

Mailing lists:
Important announcements will be sent to the class mailing list. You are responsible for the material sent to that list, so make sure that you read your e-mail frequently. The mail sent to the class list is also archived. Note that if you are not officially enrolled in the class, we cannot add you to this mailing list because it is automatically generated.

Reading

The following is the tentative reading schedule. Please wait to read each paper until details have been announced in class; I may either switch papers (unlikely) or give suggestions on which parts of the paper you should focus or skim (likely). The full citation information for each paper is available from this page.

You will have three basic responsibilities for the readings covered in the course:

1 - Read the assigned papers before class. Without doing so, discussion is not as interesting!

2 - Form a discussion group. You should have three or four people in your group, and discuss each paper sometime before class meets. It is up to you if you want to meet just once a week or twice a week before each class, but you should discuss each paper. When you have formed a group, please send me email with a list of group members. When discussing each paper, you are encouraged to consider the following questions:

1. What problem are the authors trying to solve?
   • Why was the problem important?
   • Why was the problem not solved by earlier work?
2. What is the authors solution to the problem?
   • How does their approach solve the problem?
   • How is the solution unique and innovative?
   • What are the details of their solution?
3. How do the authors evaluate their solution?
   • What specific questions do they answer?
   • What simplifying assumptions do they make?
   • What is their methodology?
   • What are the strengths and weaknesses of their solution?
   • What is left unknown?
4. What do you think?
   • Is the problem still important?
   • Did the authors solve the stated problem?
   • Did the authors adequately demonstrate that they solved the problem?
5. What future work does this research point to?

3 - Write-up each paper (or set of papers per lecture). Your write-up for each lecture should consist of a very short essay-style answer. The list of questions to answer can be found here. Turn in your write-up via email by sending them to cs736-handin@cs before 11 a.m. on the day of the class where we discuss the paper, with the due date in the subject line (e.g., 01/25). Late write-ups will automatically receive a null score. Write-ups must be in plain text. More hints on a good write-up include:

• Answer the specific question that has been posted.
• Do not write more than two paragraphs.
• Do not quote large parts directly from the paper.
• Use your own words and thoughts.
• Look at the sample responses that were selected as good examples.

Projects

The warm-up project is meant to be done fairly quickly; you will have two weeks to work on this assignment. You will work on this project individually and then hand in a short report on your results. This project will be fairly well-defined. More details will be available later.

The main project in this course has two goals. The first goal is to help you learn more about doing research in general. The second goal is to give you the opportunity to study a particular area of OS in greater detail. Therefore, you are expected to perform a substantial research project; this involves selecting an open problem, reading the related work, designing, implementing, and evaluating a solution, and presenting your results. Your completed projects should be of high enough quality that it could (eventually) be published in a major operating systems conference. People should work in groups of size two; under no circumstances will larger groups be permitted!

You are strongly encouraged to select a project from my list of suggestions (but a project of your own devising is possible given sufficient justification at our initial project meeting). This list will be made available soon. Remember, the best project for you is the one you feel motivated to do (not the easiest one, and not the most-likely-to-get-me-a-paper one). The project is your chance to work on something new and different -- I sincerely hope that not only will you learn a lot while doing your project, but also that you will have a lot of fun!

Throughout the semester, there will be a few milestones that you must meet for your main project:

• Initial Meeting: We will use the initial meeting to help figure out which projects would be a good match for your interests and previous experience; therefore, before this initial meeting, you should have narrowed down the list of potential projects to two or three that you are interested in and should have read the listed background papers. Of course, you are more than welcome to informally talk to me about potential projects before this meeting!
• Proposal Report: After our meeting, you should determine exactly what problem you will solve. In your project proposal, you should clearly state the problem you are planning to solve, the motivation for why this problem is important, your initial plans for approaching the problem, and your proposed methodology for evaluation. This report should contain references to at least one related background paper (not already listed by me) that you have read. Your write-up should be approximately a full page in length (or 500-1000 words).
• Related work report: An important component in research is placing your contribution in the context of past work, which involves differentiating your work from previous work. (There is nothing worse than working on a problem, only to discover several months into the work, that someone has already solved it!) To ensure that you have found the applicable background material before beginning your own work, I would like to see a summary of the relevant papers that you have read (or, alas, skimmed). While the number of relevant papers will vary depending upon your project, you should search for 8 to 10 references and write 500-1000 words. To find relevant papers, you may want to check out the resources at the end of this page. Your report should contain the appropriate citations in a Reference section (I would suggest using bibtex for this). This write-up may later become the Related Work section of your final report (of course, you may need to add references, especially if the direction of your contribution changes).
• Progress Meeting: After you have had about a month to work on your project, we will meet to discuss your progress and any problems that you are having. This will be an informal meeting, but you should come to the meeting prepared to talk about your initial results.
• Final Meeting: Near the end of the semester, we will have one last meeting to discuss your results. At this meeting, you should summarize the problem you are solving, your approach, your methodology, and your results; you should plan how you will talk about these issues, but you do not need to prepare slides. You should absolutely bring all of your experimental results (in graph or table form). At this meeting, you will receive feedback on what you need to complete before your final report.
• In-class presentations: All students will give a very brief overview of their projects in the last week of classes. Each group will have approximately 10 minutes to describe their work to the rest of the class. Given this short time-frame, you will be giving only a very broad overview of your results; do not expect to distill everything that you did and learned in this talk! The time limit will be strictly enforced! You may want to check out the following site for some hints on giving a good talk.
• Final report: Your final write-up should be similar in style, length, and content to an OS conference paper. This is clearly the most important part of demonstrating your project! More details on writing the report will be given in class.

Event	Due Date
Warm-up project available:	Mon 1/28
Warm-up project due:	Mon 2/11 (5pm)
Initial meeting:	Fri 2/22
Proposal:	Fri 3/01 (5 pm)
Related work report:	Fri 3/22 (5 pm)
Progress meeting:	Fri 4/05
Final meeting:	Week of 4/29
In-class presentations:	Week of 5/6
Final report:	Wed 5/15

Grading

Resources

Specific OS Publications:
Operating system research papers are presented in a number of major conferences and journal. When looking for related work, it also makes sense to at least look at the titles and abstracts from papers published in the sources for the last few years.

• Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP): The most visible OS conference; held every two years.
• Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI): A newer conference, introduced in 1994, to fill in the years when there is not an SOSP.
• USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX): More focus on implementation issues
• Sigmetrics Conference on Measurement & Modeling of Computer Systems (Sigmetrics) More focus on evaluation
• Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS)
• ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS): the primary systems journal
• Communications of the ACM (CACM): often more suitable for a wider computer science audience

In summary, these are the top conferences and journals to keep in mind for OS research, whether you are thinking about publishing your own work, searching for related work, or trying to keep out-to-date with the field.

Finally, a collection of advice papers is available in the Advice Papers List. I highly recommend that you read these papers on your own; however, you will not be held responsible for them.

Local Resources
Computer Systems Lab Homepage
Crash and Burn Lab