CSE 551: An Introduction to Computer Systems Research

• Syllabus
• Discussion board
• Schedule and reading list
• Problem sets
• Design Exercises
• Project Outlines
• Anonymous feedback form

• Quals course (systems area), 5th year masters course
• Instructor: Tom Anderson (tom@...)
• TA: Lisa Glendenning (lglenden@...)
• Office Hours: By appointment
• Class meetings: Mon/Wed 10:30-11:50, CSE 403
• Recitation sections: Thursdays 4:30, CSE 203
• Pre-requisite: CSE 451 or equivalent
• Credits: 4 credits (3 lecture hours plus recitation)

9/30: Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson. The UNIX Timesharing System. Communications of the ACM 17(7), July 1974.

10/5: David Clark. The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols. SIGCOMM 88.

10/1
Project discussion and Seattle tutorial.

No class on 10/12 or 10/14; instead we'll meet 10/16

Background reading: Andrew Birrell, An Introduction to Programming with Threads, DEC SRC Research Report 35, January 1989.

10/7: Butler Lampson and David Redell. Experience with Processes and Monitors in Mesa. Communications of the ACM, volume 23, issue 2, February 1980.

10/16: Pai et al., Flash: An Efficient and Portable Web Server, USENIX 1999.

10/8
Individual meetings with project teams instead of section.
Problem set #1 assigned.

10/14
Project outline due at 5 p.m..

10/15
Thread programming practice.

10/19: Thomas Anderson, Brian Bershad, Edward Lazowska, and Henry Levy. Scheduler Activations: Effective Kernel Support for the User-Level management of Parallelism. ACM TOCS, February 1992, pp. 53-79.

10/21: Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat. MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters. OSDI 2004.

10/22
No section.
Problem set #1 due.

Background reading: Michael J. Franklin. Concurrency Control and Recovery.

10/26: Gray et al. The Recovery Manager of the System R Database Manager. ACM Computing Surveys, 1981.

10/28: Bernstein, Hadzilacos, and Goodman. Distributed Recovery. Chapter 7 in Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems (up to 3PC).

10/29
Guest speaker at section: Steve Riley, Amazon, Cloud Computing.

11/2: Mendel Rosenblum and John K. Ousterhout. The Design and Implementation of a Log-Structured File System. ACM Trans. on Computer Systems 10(1), February 1992, pp. 26-52.

11/4: Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung. The Google File System. SOSP 2003.

11/5
Design exercise #1 first draft due at noon: PCM-based storage system.

Consensus

No class on 11/11; instead we'll meet 11/13

11/9: Lamport, Time, Clocks and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System, CACM 1978.

11/13: Lamport, Paxos Made Simple, ACM SIGACT News, 2001.

11/12
Design exercise #2 first draft due at noon: High availability web service.

11/16: A. Bensoussan et al. The Multics virtual memory: concepts and design. Communications of the ACM, volume 15, issue 5, May 1972.

11/18: Paul Barham et al. Xen and the Art of Virtualization SOSP 2003.

11/19
Section: Internet review (optional).

Design exercise #2 final draft due.

Problem set #3 assigned.

No class on 11/25

Background reading: Peter J. Denning, The Working Set Model for Program Behavior, SOSP 1967.

11/23: Kai Li and Paul Hudak. Memory Coherence in Shared Virtual Memory Systems. ACM Trans. on Computer Systems 7(4), November 1989, pp. 321-359.

No section (Thanksgiving).

11/24
Problem set #2 due.

Background reading: Salzer and Kaashoek. The Network as a System. Chapter 7 in Principles of Computer System Design. MIT OpenCourseWare, 2009.

Should read: Hari Balakrishnan. An Introduction to Wide-Area Internet Routing. Unpublished.

11/30: Thomas Anderson, Andy Collins, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and John Zahorjan. PCP: Efficient Endpoint Congestion Control, NSDI 2006.

12/2: John John, Ethan Katz-Bassett, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Thomas Anderson and Arun Venkataramani. Consensus Routing: The Internet as a Distributed System. NSDI 2008.

12/3
Guest speaker at section: Steve Riley, Amazon, Protocol Insecurity.

12/7: Lampson, Computer Security in the Real World, 2001.

12/9: Lampson. Hints for Computer System Design. ACM Operating Systems Review, Vol. 15, No. 5, October 1983.

12/10
Problem set #3 due.

12/14, 8:30 am - 12:10 pm:
Final project presentations (CSE 503).