15-712 Syllabus

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Textbooks

There are no official texts for the course. If you're not familiar with the background material, you may wish to look at:

• Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau's OS lecture notes are a great, free, online resource for background ugrad OS concepts.
• Operating Systems: Principles and Practice, by Thomas Anderson and Michael Dahlin.
• Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, third edition, by Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie. It is available in the CMU Bookstore. Covers background networking material that we assume students will be generally familiar with.
• Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by W. Richard Stevens, Addison-Wesley, 1993.
• Unix Network Programming: Networking APIs: Sockets and XTI (Volume 1) by W. Richard Stevens.
• The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis, by Raj Jain.
• Distributed Algorithms, by Nancy Lynch

You might take a peek at the two CMU undergrad systems courses for background information on operating systems (15-410) and networking (15-441).

Suggested Readings

You may also find the following readings useful:

• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, by Fred Brooks
• Scale and performance in a distributed file system, Howard, Kazar, Menees, Nichols, Satyanarayanan, Sidebotham, and West. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (Feb 1988). This paper describes AFS, and is cited by most papers that evaluate filesystem performance. Many people simply know this paper as Howard88. You may find this interesting because you use AFS, and you may need to cite this if you build a storage system.
• End-to-end arguments in system design, Saltzer, Reed, and Clark. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (Nov 1984). This paper presents the design principle that functionality should be end-to-end. For example, data should be verified or encrypted at the source and destination rather than along the way. Mechanisms in the middle tend to be redundant.

Grading

Your final grade for the course will be based on the following weights:

• 40% Project
• 20% Midterm exam
• 20% Final exam
• 20% Paper Summaries, homeworks, and participation

The project in 15-712 is an open-ended research project, done in groups of three. The project requires a proposal, a project status report, and a final report (both written and presented).

Schedule

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Date	Topics	Notes	Readings
Mon 8/26	Introduction	Wisdom papers	KeshavHowToRead, StentHowToRead, LevisHowToRead, Hamming86, Lampson83,
Part 1: Concurrency, Threads, Parallelism, Ordering, and Races
Wed 8/28	Implementing remote procedure calls	SigOps HoF paper	Saltzer84, Birrell84,
Fri 8/30	Datacenter RPCs can be General and Fast		Kalia18,
Mon 9/2	No Class - Labor Day
Wed 9/4	Using Threads in Interactive Systems: A Case Study		Hauser93,
Fri 9/6	Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System	SigOps HoF paper	Lamport78,
Part 2: More bugs than a bait store
Mon 9/9	Eraser: A Dynamic Data Race Detector for Multi-Threaded Programs	SOSP'97 best paper. Bugs as Deviant Behavior (SOSP'01).	Savage97,
Wed 9/11	IronFleet: Proving Practical Distributed Systems Correct	A discussion in The Morning Paper.	Hawblitzel15,
Part 3: File Systems and Disks
Fri 9/13	AFS	Leases paper. SigOps HoF papers	Howard88,
Mon 9/16	Attend the Stefan Savage Talk!	Announcement here but PLEASE REGISTER BY FRIDAY
Wed 9/18	The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System	SigOps HoF paper.	Rosenblum92,
Fri 9/20	A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)	SigOps HoF paper. Fast'07 best paper.	Patterson88, Schroeder07,
Part 4: Big Data Systems
Mon 9/23	MapReduce and Ray	SigOps HoF paper. For more see Spark, Nyad, and Dryad.	Dean04, Moritz18,
Wed 9/25	DBOS: A DB-oriented Operating System		DBOS,
Part 5: Kernels and Parallelism
Fri 9/27	OS Architecture and Extensibility: SPIN and the Exokernel	SOSP'97 paper. SigOps HoF paper. Original Exokernel paper Multikernel (SOSP'09).	Bershad95, Kaashoek97,
Mon 9/30	Fault Tolerance: Primary-Backup State Machine Replication		VMFT,
Wed 10/2	Paxos	Wikipedia Paxos article. Lamport's original Greek parable Lamport's comments on original paper..	Lamport01,
Fri 10/4	No Class - Rosh Hashanah
Mon 10/7	Project Discussions With Staff
Wed 10/9	Midterm Review
Fri 10/11	Midterm 1
Mon 10/14	No Class - Fall Break
Wed 10/16	No Class - Fall Break
Fri 10/18	No Class - Fall Break
Mon 10/21	Project Discussions with Staff
Wed 10/23	The Scalable Commutativity Rule: Designing Scalable Software for Multicore Processors	SOSP'13 best paper	Clements13,
Fri 10/25	No class
Part 6: Transactions and Databases
Mon 10/28	On Optimistic Methods for Concurrency Control	SigOps HoF paper. Spectulative Execution in a Distributed File System Efficient Locking for Concurrent Operations on B-Trees	Kung81,
Wed 10/30	Project Meetings (all day)
Fri 11/1	No class
Mon 11/4	Concurrency Control and Recovery	Bernstein's concurrency notes - MVCC, Coordination Avoidance	Franklin97,
Wed 11/6	No class
Fri 11/8	No Class - dga unavailable
Mon 11/11	No class
Part 7: Generalized Fault Tolerance and Security
Wed 11/13	The Byzantine Generals Problem	Lamport's comments on the Byzantine Generals paper. Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance OSDI'99.	Lamport82,
Fri 11/15	No class
Mon 11/18	Reflections on Trusting Trust, Why Cryptosystems Fail, Crisis and Aftermath	SigOps HoF paper. Write Summary only for Anderson94.	Thompson84, Anderson94, Spafford89,
Wed 11/20	Highlights from the SOSP15 History Day Talks	SOSP15 History Day.
Fri 11/22	Midterm 2
Mon 11/25	No Class - Early Thanksgiving Break
Wed 11/27	No Class - Thanksgiving Break
Fri 11/29	No Class - Thanksgiving Break
Mon 12/2	No class. We grade, you project.
Wed 12/4	TBD
Fri 12/6	TBD