COS-518 Information

Overview

Programming assingments: Several programming assignments will be given at the beginning of the semester to introduce students to system development. This year, students will be asked to initially implement a simple caching web proxy with blocking I/O. Subsequent assignments will have students extend this proxy to support concurrency through a variety of mechanisms: multiple processes via fork(), threads via pthreads, asynchronous I/O and select(), and asynch I/O libraries via libasync and tamer.
Class participation: Papers will be discussed in a very involved manner. All students are expected to have thoroughly read and considered each assigned paper, prepared to answer and pose questions about each reading.
Presentation(s): Each student is expected to present one or more papers during the course of the semester. These papers are drawn from the reading list of the course, and they are not expected to be the students' original work.
Project: The project in COS-518 is an open-ended research project, done in groups of one or two. The project requires an initial proposal, two meetings with the instructor to discuss the project, and a final written report. More information can be found on the Project page.
Grading: Your final grade for the course will be based on the following weights:
- 20% Programming assignments
- 30% Class participation
- 10% Presentation(s) on assigned readings
- 40% Project

Prerequisites

This class is appropriate for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, especially those interested in systems. Some familiarity with system/network programming will be helpful; undergraduates should have taken 318 and/or 461.

Textbooks

There are no official texts for the course. However, we suggest the following texts to accompany the content in this class.

Principles of Computer System DesignPublisher's website. ISBN: 978-0-12-374957-4.
Modern Operating Systems, 2/E by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.
Publisher's website. ISBN: 978-0-130-31358-4.
Reliable Distributed Systems: Technologies, Web Services, and Applications by Kenneth P. Birman.
Publisher's website. ISBN: 978-0-387-21509-9.

For reference, all three of these texts have been placed on reserve at the library for this class.