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:

• Operating Systems Concepts, by Silberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne. This and the below text cover mostly background material that we assume students will be generally familiar with (both of these texts go beyond what we'll expect).
• Modern Operating Systems, 2nd edition, by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.
• 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
• Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau's OS lecture notes are a great, free, online resource for background ugrad OS concepts.

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

Also available as an ical file that you can subscribe to.

Date	Topics	Notes	Readings
Mon 01/16	No class - MLK Day
Fri 01/20	Introduction	Homework 1 assigned
Mon 01/23	MapReduce and Dryad		Dean04, Isard07
Fri 01/27	FAWN	Challenges and Opportunities...	Andersen09
Mon 01/30	YCSB++		Patil11
Fri 02/03	File system measurement		Ousterhout85, Baker91, Harter11
Mon 02/06	Log-structured file system		Rosenblum92
Fri 02/10	RAID	Homework 1 due	Patterson88, Schroeder07
Mon 02/13	AFS and Coda	Leases paper. Project groups and initial ideas due	Howard88, Kistler92
Fri 02/17	No class - Meeting with groups to discuss projects
Mon 02/20	Google File System	NASD	Ghemawat03
Fri 02/24	Bigtable	Project proposal due	Chang06
Mon 02/27	Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events		Lamport78
Fri 03/02	Paxos	Wikipedia Paxos article. Lamport's original Greek parable.	Lamport01
Mon 03/05	Midterm exam
Fri 03/09	No class - Mid-Semester Break
Mon 03/12	No class - Spring Break
Fri 03/16	No class - Spring Break
Mon 03/19	Byzantine Fault Tolerance	Lamport's comments on the Byzantine Generals paper (see also here).	Castro99, Lamport82
Fri 03/23	Byzantine Fault Tolerance (2)
Mon 03/26	RPC		Birrell84
Fri 03/30	ExoKernel and SPIN		Kaashoek97, Bershad95
Mon 04/02	Eraser	Project progress report due	Savage97
Fri 04/06	VMWare	US6397242	Waldspurger02
Mon 04/09	Xen	Live migration	Barham03
Fri 04/13	No class
Mon 04/16	Dynamo		DeCandia07
Fri 04/20	No class - Spring Carnival
Mon 04/23	Mesos		Hindman11
Fri 04/27	Hints for Computer System Design; Worse is Better		Lampson84, WorseIsBetter
Mon 04/30	You and Your Research; Course review		Hamming86
Fri 05/04	Project presentation, 9:30am-11:50am, GHC 4303
Fri 05/11	Final exam, 10:00am-11:30am, GHC 4301 (not GHC 4303)
Sun 05/13		Final report due