CSE 550 - Systems for All

Schedule & Readings

All times are in Pacific Timezone. Discussion post submissions are due 9AM PT the day of the class and assignments are due 11:59 PM PT.

Date	Reading	Notes	Assignments
March 30, 2026 Lecture 1	Introduction & History Course logistics Basic Material regarding computer systems The UNIX Time-Sharing System *Optional Reading* The Evolution of Unix Time-sharing System Introduction to Operating Systems The Manchester Mark I and Atlas: A historical Perspective Virtual Memory Management VMM/VAX/VMS	[Slides]	Assignment #1 Due date: April 20, 2026
April 1, 2026 Lecture 2	Broad Systems Strokes How to Read a Paper Hints for Computer System Design *Optional Reading* Experience with Processes and Monitors in Mesa Concurrent Threads Locks and Conditional Variables Scheduling Pilot: An Operating System for a Personal Computer	[Slides]	Assignment Groups Due Please email Instructor and TA. Team Size: 2 or 3
April 6, 2026 Lecture 3	Concurrency Control Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed system Consistent Global States of Distributed Systems The 2nd paper listed is a tedious read. You could skip most sections and only focus on Section 13 and 5 in order to answer the discussion questions on canvas	[Slides]
April 8, 2026 Lecture 4	File Systems Design and Implementation of Log-Structured File System	[Slides]	Project Groups Due (11:59 PM) Please email Instructor and TA. Max Team Size: 3
April 13, 2026 Lecture 5	Networking: General Discussion The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols End-to-End Arguments in System Design	[Slides]
April 15, 2026 Lecture 6	Networking: Congestion Control Congestion Avoidance and Control *Optional Reading* The QUIC Transport Protocol: Design and Internet-Scale Deployment Congestion-Control Throwdown	[Slides]
April 20, 2026 Lecture 7	Networking: Routing Interdomain Internet Routing, BGP *Optional Reading* DNS, HTTP, HTTPS Interdomain Routing Security	[slides]	Project Proposals Due (11:59 PM) Instructions
April 22, 2026 Lecture 8	The Tussle Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet	[slides]	Assignment #2 Due date: May 15, 2026 11:59PM PT
April 27, 2026 Lecture 9	OS Kernels Exokernel: An Operating System Architecture for Application-Level Resource Management	[slides]	[Paxos Project]
April 29, 2026 Lecture 10	Virtualization Xen and the Art of Virtualization	[slides]
May 4, 2026	no class, at NSDI
May 6, 2026	no class, at NSDI
May 11, 2026 Lecture 13	Large Scale Storage Systems The Google File System	[slides]
May 13, 2026 Lecture 14	Structured Storage Big Table: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data *Optional Reading* Spanner: Google’s Globally Distributed Database No Compromises: distributed transactions with consistency, availability, and performance (FARM) F1: A distributed SQL Database That Scales	[slides]
May 18, 2026 Lecture 15	Big Data MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters *Optional Reading* Resilient Distributed Datasets: A Fault-Tolerant Abstraction for In-Memory Cluster Computing (Spark) Parallel Databases: Gamma and Column-Stores Optimizing Joins on MapReduce MapReduce: A Flexible Data Processing Tool MapReduce and Parallel DBMSs: Friends or Foes? Pig Latin: A Not-So-Foreign Language for Data Processing Hive: A warehousing solution over a map-reduce framework PipeDream: Generalized Pipeline Parallelism for DNN Training	[slides]
May 20, 2026 Lecture 16	Secure and Trusted Compute The protection of Information in Computer Systems or Lampson, Computer Security in the Real World	[slides]
May 25, 2026	No Class. Memorial Day.	NA
May 27, 2026 Lecture 17	BFT / Blockchain / P2P Systems Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance *Optional Reading* Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System From Viewstamped Replication to Byzantine Fault Tolerance	[slides]
June 1, 2026 Lecture 18	Ratul's Lecture hotnets23-adn Paper 2	[slides]
June 3, 2026 Lecture 19	TBD
Finals Week June 10, 2026	Project Presentations 2:30PM PT - 4:20 PM PT	[Presentation Instructions]

Instructor: Kurtis Heimerl, kheimerl(at)cs

TA: Jiexiao Xu, jiexiao(at)cs

Lectures: (Location: CSE2 G04)

Mon 11:30am - 12:50pm
Wed 11:30am - 12:50pm

Office hours:[Zoom meeting IDs available over Canvas or on request]

Wed 10:30-11:20am (Kurtis)
Mon 2:00-3:00pm (Gates 151) (Jiexiao)

All times listed are in Pacific Timezone

Course Calendar (Google Calendar)

For the zoom links, please check Canvas. Zoom links will not be made available on this public calendar. Use the + button below to add to your calendar.