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

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

Date	Topics	Notes	Readings
Mon 01/14	Introduction	Wisdom papers	Brooks75, Hamming86, Lampson83, Gabriel91–Section 2.1 only, Saltzer84, Ritchie74
Part 1: Concurrency, Threads, Parallelism, Ordering, and Races
Wed 01/16	Implementing remote procedure calls	SigOps HoF paper	Birrell84
Fri 01/18	Datacenter RPCs can be General and Fast		Kalia18
Mon 01/21	MLK: No class
Wed 01/23	Using Threads in Interactive Systems: A Case Study		Hauser93
Fri 01/25	Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System	SigOps HoF paper	Lamport78
Part 2: Bugs, Bugs, Bugs
Mon 01/28	Eraser: A Dynamic Data Race Detector for Multi-Threaded Programs	SOSP'97 best paper. Bugs as Deviant Behavior (SOSP'01).	Savage97
Wed 01/30	Using Model Checking to Find Serious File System Errors	OSDI'04 best paper. Towards Optimization-Safe Systems. SOSP'13 best paper.	Yang04
Part 3: File Systems and Disks
Fri 02/01	AFS	Leases paper. SigOps HoF papers	Howard88
Mon 02/04	The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System	SigOps HoF paper. Deadline to form project groups.	Rosenblum92
Wed 02/06	A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)	SigOps HoF paper. Fast'07 best paper.	Patterson88, Schroeder07
Part 4: Big Data Systems
Fri 02/08	MapReduce and Spark	SigOps HoF paper. NSDI'12 best paper. Dryad.	Dean04, Zaharia12
Mon 02/11	TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems		TensorFlow
Wed 02/13	Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store		DeCandia07
Fri 02/15	Paxos	Wikipedia Paxos article. Lamport's original Greek parable Lamport's comments on original paper..	Lamport01
Mon 02/18	No class
Part 5: Kernels and Parallelism
Wed 02/20	OS Architecture and Extensibility: SPIN and the Exokernel	SOSP'97 paper. SigOps HoF paper. Original Exokernel paper Multikernel (SOSP'09).	Bershad95, Kaashoek97
Fri 02/22	The Scalable Commutativity Rule: Designing Scalable Software for Multicore Processors	SOSP'13 best paper	Clements15
Mon 02/25	Midterm Review
Wed 02/27	No class
Fri 03/01	Midterm 1
Mon 03/04	No class
Wed 03/06	Project Discussions with Staff
Fri 03/08	Mid-Semester Break: No class
Mon 03/11	Spring Break: No class
Wed 03/13	Spring Break: No class
Fri 03/15	Spring Break: No class
Mon 03/18	Lecture TBD
Wed 03/20	No class
Fri 03/22	No class
Part 6: Transactions and Databases
Mon 03/25	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 03/27	Project Meetings (all day)
Fri 03/29	Concurrency Control and Recovery	Bernstein's concurrency notes - MVCC, Coordination Avoidance	Franklin97
Mon 04/01	No class	Interim project report due.
Wed 04/03	No class
Fri 04/05	No class
Part 7: Generalized Fault Tolerance and Security
Mon 04/08	Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance	Lamport's comments on the Byzantine Generals paper. The Byzantine Generals Problem.	Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Wed 04/10	No class
Fri 04/12	Spring Carnival: No class
Mon 04/15	Reflections on Trusting Trust, Why Cryptosystems Fail, Crisis and Aftermath	SigOps HoF paper. Write Summary only for Andersen94.	Thompson84, Anderson94, Spafford89
Wed 04/17	No class
Fri 04/19	No class
Mon 04/22	Highlights from the SOSP15 History Day Talks	SOSP15 History Day.
Wed 04/24	Midterm 2
Fri 04/26	No class
Fri 04/29	No class
Fri 05/01	No class
Mon 05/06	Project Presentations
Wed 05/08	Project Presentations	Final report due before midnight tonight