Computer Laboratory – Course material 2008–09: Advanced Systems Topics

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Advanced Systems Topics

Lecturers: Dr S.M. Hand, Dr T.G. Griffin and Dr C. Mascolo

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 networking, operating systems, database systems, mobility and sensor systems. It aims to help students develop and understand complex systems and interactions, and to prepare them for emerging systems architectures.

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 and persistent virtual memory. Hypervisors and machine virtualization. Networked storage architectures (NAS, SAN). Database and filing system topics. [SMH, 6 lectures]
Mobile and sensor systems. This section concerns systems and communication in decentralized mobile networks and sensor systems. In mobile systems we will concentrate on issues arising from the application of these systems to vehicular networking, human ad hoc connectivity and decentralized content distribution. In terms of sensor systems we will look at energy and communication tradeoffs for of both mobile and fixed devices with application in various scenarios such as human and animal activity monitoring and environmental monitoring. [CM, 4 lectures]

Objectives

On completing the course, students should be able to

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
describe three techniques for supporting extensibility
argue for and against distributed shared virtual memory
discuss the tradeoffs between energy and communication in mobile and sensor systems.

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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