Systems seminar (590s): Winter 2008

Wednesdays 1:30-2:30pm, in EEB 054

For the first half of this quarter, we'll be reading an old paper and a new paper on a given topic each week. Our hope is that we'll consider how much time has passed on each topic relative to what has changed. Which are high-value topics that continue to produce ideas and impact? Which are challenging topics waiting to be cracked before their impact is felt? What should we be working on, anyways?

• Jan 9: organizational meeting

Jan 16: Robert Grimm, NYU

Adventures in Extensibility -- Of Languages and Compilers
Robert Grimm, NYU

Programming language technologies help reduce software complexity. But they are hard to realize, since compilers are complex systems themselves. To simplify compiler construction, the xtc project explores how to make languages and their compilers more easily extensible and to thus encourage the reuse of compiler components. This talk presents the resulting toolkit, which focuses on source-to-source transformers that translate extended languages to more basic versions. The xtc toolkit includes a parser generator, a type checker generator, and a code generator generator. I illustrate xtc with examples from the Jeannie language, which extends both Java and C by nesting Java and C code within each other at the level of individual statements and expressions. By fully combining the two languages' syntax and semantics, Jeannie eliminates verbose boiler-plate code, enables static error detection across the language boundary, and simplifies dynamic resource management. xtc makes this novel language composition practical, while also demonstrating the power of language technologies for reducing software complexity.

Jan 23: Type-safe languages and OS design

• (Mike) The Impact of Mesa on System Design (Lauer and Satterthwaite, ICSE '79)
• (Tanya) Extensibility, Safety and Performance in the SPIN Operating System (Bershad et al., SOSP '95)

Jan 30: File systems

Special Room: CSE 403

• (Roxana) Semantic File Systems (Gifford et al, SOSP '91)
• (Alexei) Scalable Semantic Web Data Management Using Vertical Partitioning (Abadi et al., VLDB 2007)

Feb 6: Supporting distributed apps

• (Ivan) Distributed Operating Systems (Tanenbaum and Van Renesse, ACM Computing Surveys '85)
• (Karl) Dryad: Distributed Data-Parallel Programs from Sequential Building Blocks (Isard et al, EuroSys '07)

Feb 13: Applications of VMMs

• (Tomas) Application and Analysis of the Virtual Machine Approach to Information System Security and Isolation (Madnick and Donovan, Workshop on Virtual Computer Systems '73)
• (Alex) Remus: High availability via asynchronous virtual machine replication (Brendan Cully, Geoffrey Lefebvre, Dutch Meyer, Anoop Karollil, Mike Feeley, Norm Hutchinson, and Andrew Warfield, to appear in NSDI '08)

Potpourri

For the second half of the quarter, we'll revert back to our usual one-paper-per-week mode:

• (Nick) Feb 20: Dynamic Spyware Analysis (Manuel Egele, Christopher Kruegel, Engin Kirda, Heng Yin, and Dawn Song, USENIX 2007)

• (Cherie) Feb 27: A Five-Year Study of File-System Metadata (Agrawal et al., FAST '07)

• March 5: Emmett Witchel, UT Austin.
  Transactional Memory and the Operating System
  Special Room: CSE 591 (Gates Commons)

  Transactional memory has recently gained attention as a way to simplify programming the multicore processors that are becoming ubiquitous in the product offerings of major CPU manufacturers. This talk addresses the interaction of hardware transactional memory and the operating system.

  The first part of the talk will motivate the need for transactions in the operating system, describe some challenges to implementation, and explain the benefits of making transactions aware of OS scheduling priorities. Cooperative, transactional spinlocks are a novel mechanism to allow a program (the OS) to use transactions and also do I/O. Quantitative results are presented from whole system simulation of a version of the Linux kernel modified to use hardware transactional memory.

  The second part of the talk will discuss ongoing work to address what we see as the the two key problems we see facing transactional memory and transactional programming: the performance problems due to structural (not semantic) write conflicts, and the interaction of system calls with transactions.

• (Harsha) March 12: DieCast: Testing Distributed Systems with an Accurate Scale Model (Diwaker Gupta, Kashi Vishwanath, and Amin Vahdat, to appear in NSDI '08)