CSE logo University of Washington Department of Computer Science & Engineering
 CSE 550: Introduction to Computer Systems Research, Winter 2014

Overview

Instructor: Arvind Krishnamurthy
Office hours: M 12:30-1:30, in CSE544, or by appointment.

TA: Lisa Glendenning (lglenden AT cs)
Office hours: by appointment (send email)

Lectures: MW, 10:30-11:50, in CSE 403.

This course will provide the common intellectual foundation for systems research, suitable as a terminal course for those not interested in further study in systems, or as a gateway course to the various specialized systems courses the department offers. The course will cover the common foundation for research in operating systems, databases, cluster and wide area distributed systems, networking, and parallel systems. The course consists of four major components: There is no midterm or final for the course.

Prerequisities: the basic prerequisite is to have taken an undergraduate operating systems course (CSE 451 or equivalent). If you haven't taken an undergrad OS course, you might still be able to manage the course but please come talk to the teaching staff. We will not be covering undergraduate material in this course.

Papers: you will be responsible for reading one or two papers before each class, and contributing your thoughts on each assigned paper to the class discussion board before the class that covers it.

Administrivia

Mailing list: When you register for the course, you'll automatically be added to the class mailing list (cse550a_wi14@uw.edu). To manage your subscription, visit the mailing list web page. You've been subscribed using your u.washington.edu email address. But, you can modify your subscription to use an email address of your choice. Note that you can only post to the mailing list from your subscribed email address.

Announcements:

Discussion Board and Dropbox

Here's the link to the class discussion board:
https://catalyst.uw.edu/gopost/board/arvindk/35376/
and the link to the dropbox for uploading assignments/projects:
https://catalyst.uw.edu/collectit/dropbox/arvindk/30013
and the link to project ideas, which you can access using your UW google apps account (@uw.edu):
https://sites.google.com/a/uw.edu/cse-550-projects/home
The discussion board can be used for two purposes:

Paper schedule

Here is the schedule of papers that might be tweaked as the quarter progresses. Note that you're required to read assigned papers, but the optional additional papers are just that: purely optional, for your interest, if you choose to go deeper on your own. Discussion board entries for the assigned papers are due by noon on the day of the associated lecture.

Date

Reading

Notes

Assignments

Jan 6 Introduction slides Assignment #1
Jan 8 Concurrency slides
Jan 13 Web services slides
Jan 15 Transactions slides
Jan 22 Concurrency and recovery slides Assignment #2
Jan 27 Distributed Computation slides
Jan 29 Consensus slides
Feb 3 Consensus
  • Paxos discussion contd.
Feb 5 Virtualization (contd.) slides
Feb 10 Software virtual memory slides
Feb 12 File Systems slides
Feb 19 Large scale storage systems
Feb 24 Consistent Storage slides
Feb 26 DHTs slides
Mar 3 Parallel Computation slides
Mar 5 Networking 1 slides
Mar 10 Networking 2
Mar 12 Class Presentations

Problem Sets

Everybody registered for the course should already have had an instructional UNIX account created for them by the department support staff, and have been notified of it. Using this account, you can remotely log into (via ssh) the attu.cs.washington.edu compute cluster. You can find more information about instructional resources here.

You should also be able to do the programming assignments on your own personal machines; none of them require large or exceptionally powerful machines. You might find it useful to install VMware for assignments involving Linux development. Both VMware Player and VMware Server are free, and downloadable from VMware's site.