Advanced Systems Topics

Lecturer: Dr S.M. Hand and others (smh22@cl.cam.ac.uk)

No. of lectures: 16

Prerequisite courses: Concurrent Systems and Applications, Digital Communication II

Aims

This course will cover a selection of topics in the general area of systems including operating systems, database systems, peer-to-peer systems and parallel and distributed systems. It aims to help students develop and understand complex systems and interactions, and to prepare them for emerging systems architectures.

Lectures

• Advanced operating systems.
  Extensible systems. Capability systems. Distributed operating systems (scheduling, resource control). Distributed and persistent virtual memory. Hypervisors and machine virtualisation. Networked storage architectures (NAS, SAN). Database and filing system topics. [SMH, 6 lectures]

• Scalable synchronization.
  Correctness properties. Facilities provided by hardware. Simple spin-locks. Queue-based locks. Lock-free data structures. Memory access ordering. [TLH, 4 lectures]

• Peer-to-peer systems.
  Client-server versus P2P. Case studies (napster, gnutella, RON, Freenet, Publius). Middleware (Chord, CAN, Tapestry, JXTA, ESM, Overcast). Applications (Storage, conferencing). [JAC, 6 lectures]

Objectives

On completing the course, students should be able to

• describe three techniques for supporting extensibility
• argue for and against distributed shared virtual memory
• describe how to build effective concurrency-control primitives for a modern computer
• compare and contrast various distributed lookup schemes
• architect a basic peer-to-peer application

Recommended books

Singal, M. & Shivaratri, N. (1994). Advanced Concepts in Operating Systems: Distributed, Database, and Multiprocessor Operating Systems. McGraw-Hill. Stonebraker, M. & Shivaratri, N. (1998). Readings in Database Systems. Morgan Kaufmann (3rd ed.).
Hennessy, J. & Patterson, D. (2003). Computer Architecture: a Quantitative Approach (Chapter 6 in particular). Morgan Kaufmann (3rd ed.).