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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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