Computer Laboratory – Course material 2007–08: Advanced Systems Topics

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Advanced Systems Topics

Lecturers: Dr K.A. Fraser, Dr T.G. Griffin and Dr S.M. Hand

No. of lectures: 16

Prerequisite courses: Concurrent Systems and Applications, Operating Systems, Digital Communication II

Aims

This course will cover a selection of topics in the general area of systems including operating systems, database 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

Scalable synchronization. Correctness properties. Facilities provided by hardware. Simple spin-locks. Queue-based locks. Lock-free data structures. Memory access ordering. [KAF, 4 lectures]
Internet Routing Protocols. Internet routing protocols from a distributed systems perspective. We will cover the five most commonly used protocols -- RIP, EIGRP, OSPF, IS-IS (all roughly based on the shortest-paths model) and BGP (which has evolved organically in the interdomain context). Convergence, scalability, and stability are the main concerns. Live-lock in BGP will be described. [TGG, 6 lectures]
Advanced operating systems. Extensible systems. Capability systems. Distributed operating systems (scheduling, resource control). Distributed and persistent virtual memory. Hypervisors and machine virtualization. Networked storage architectures (NAS, SAN). Database and filing system topics. [SMH, 6 lectures]

Objectives

On completing the course, students should be able to

describe how to build effective concurrency-control primitives for a modern computer
describe three techniques for supporting extensibility
argue for and against distributed shared virtual memory
describe similarities and differences between current Internet routing protocols
explain the fundamental tradeoffs in attempting to achieve stability, scalability, and fast convergence for routing protocols

Recommended reading

Singhal, 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.). ISBN 1-55860-523-1
Hennessy, J. & Patterson, D. (2006). Computer architecture: a quantitative approach (Chapter 4 in particular). Morgan Kaufmann (4th ed.).
Hedrick, C. (1988). RFC 1058 -- Routing information protocol. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1058.txt.
Basu, A. & Riecke, J.G. (2001). Stability issues in OSPF routing. http://www.sigcomm.org/sigcomm2001/p18-basu.pdf.
Huston, G. (2007). Damping BGP. The ISP Column, June 2007. http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2007-06/dampbgp.html

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