COS316

• Staff
• Lectures
• Precepts
• Assignments/PSETS
• Calendar

Welcome to the homepage for COS 316, Principles of Computer System Design, Fall 2019.

Description. This course teaches students the design, implementation, and evaluation of computer systems, including operating systems, networking, and distributed systems.The course will teach students to evaluate the performance and study the design choices of existing systems. Students will also learn general systems concepts that support design goals of modularity, performance, and security. Students will apply materials learned in lectures and readings to design, build and evaluate new systems components.

Textbook. There is no required textbook in this course, because there is no one book that covers the right material in an up-to-date fashion. Some required articles/papers/blogs/etc. will be posted on-line. We also suggest the following textbook:

Principles of Computer System Design by M. Frans Kaashoek, Jerome H. Saltzer. Morgan Kaufmann. May 2009

An online version of the textbook is available at Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), which is available to all student members. Membership ($19) in ACM also provides access to a wide variety of other resources, such as textbooks and videos on the Go programming language and the Git distributed version control system.

Grading. Assignments - 50%; Final Project - 10%; Two Exams - 30%; Potential Problem Sets - 10%

Staff

Below you will find our contact information, but please consider posting your question on Piazza before contacting an individual staff member.

Prof. Amit Levy Instructor

Dr. Alan Kaplan Co-Instructor

Danny Chen Preceptor

Ashwini Raina Preceptor

Mary Hogan Preceptor

David Hao Liu Preceptor

Will Sweeny Undergraduate Course Assistant

Lectures

Lectures meet on Monday and Wednesday 1:30-2:20pm in CS 104. There are two in-class written exams: Wednesday October 23 and Wednesday December 11.

Precepts

Programming Assignments and Problem Sets

Programming assignments will be published, submitted and testing using GitHub. You will need to create a GitHub account using your Princeton email address.

All problem sets (PSETS) must be done individually.

All programming assignments must be done in groups of two partners.

There is a final project, which is due on Dean's Date January 14, 2020.

Regrades: If you feel we have made a mistake while grading your work, email your preceptor with a short note describing the potential mistake. You must do this within two weeks of the work being returned.

Late days: You may use up to seven (7) late days for programming assignments. The late days are assigned retroactively to give you the best possible overall grade on your programming assignments. Programming assignments are in general due at 11:00pm. Your score for one programming assignment is the commit with the highest graded score and valid submission time. You do not need to declare the use of late days for each individual assignment. At the end of the semester, we will find the best allocation of late days across all your programming assignments, such that all your submissions sums to the highest score.

You may not use late days for problem sets and the Dean's Date project

Late assignment penalties will be waived only in the case of unforeseeable circumstances like medical emergencies, as documented by your Dean or Director of Studies and our approval.

DATE DUE	TOPIC	MATERIALS
9/12	Assignment 0: Configure Virtual Environment
9/24 @ 23:00	Assignment 1: Socket Programming Group	Instructions
10/3 @ 23:00	Problem Set 1 - Systems Individual
10/8 @ 23:00	Assignment 2: HTTP Routing Framework Group
10/15 @ 23:00	Problem Set 2 - Naming Individual
10/22 @ 23:00	Assignment 3: In-Memory Cache Group
11/19 @ 23:00	Assignment 4: Object Relational Mapper (ORM) Group
11/26 @ 23:00	Problem Set 3 - Resource Management Individual
12/3 @ 23:00	Assignment 5: Database Connection Pool Group
12/13 @ 23:00	Assignment 6: Access Control Lists Group
1/14 @ 17:00	Final Project: System Analysis Group

Collaboration Policy

This course permits many forms of collaboration, including help from course staff, classmates, and lab TAs. Googling is allowed, even encouraged, in this course. You may use any online resource as long as you cite the source (e.g., including the URL of source in the code).

Here is a summary, where ✔ means YES and ❌ means NO. If you have any questions, please contact the course staff. Note the summer refers to Groups - when you are working on an individual assignment, your group consists of one - yourself.

Your solutions. The term solutions refers to any of the products created when completing an, such as source code (including comments) and documentation. It includes both finished and unfinished products, regardless of correctness or completeness.

• You must never expose solutions to anyone who is taking COS 316 now or who might take COS 316 in the future.
• If you leave your computer unattended, be sure to protect it with a password.
• You must never receive or view someone else's solutions to a programming assignment (or variant of an assignment).

Working Groups. All programming assignments require you to work in groups. Here are the rules regarding group work.

• A group must consist of two students.
• You can work in different groups on different programming assignments.
• Each group should submit a single solution, which should be clearly labeled with the names of the group's members. Only one member of the group needs to submit the group's solution. There is no need to submit redundant copies for the other members.
• The members of a group will all receive the same grade on an programming assignment, reflecting the quality of the group's collective solution to the programming assignment.
• It is up to you to divide up the work within your group, and to make sure that the other members of your group meet their commitments. (If a member of your group is consistently irresponsible, let us know and we'll take appropriate action.)
• If you have trouble finding a group, let us know and we will help you.

Why Work in Groups? There are several reasons for our decision to make you work in groups.

• In the real world, people work in groups. We want you to learn how.
• Designing, implementing and evaluating systems requires you to deal with engineering tradeoffs and make difficult design decisions. We hope that you'll debate these decisions within your group, and that the debates will be educational.

Plagiarism. As members of the University community, students are bound by the rules and procedures described in Rights, Rules, Responsibilities.

All the rules above continue to apply after assignments are graded and after the end of the semester.

Calendar

This schedule may change. We will update this calendar with the latest information when we need to make scheduling changes. Though last-minute changes are rare, we encourage you to check this calendar again before going to office hours.