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Advanced Systems Topics
Lecturer: Dr S.M. Hand and others
No. of lectures: 16
Prerequisite courses: Concurrent Systems and Applications, Operating Systems II, 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
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.).
Hennessy, J. & Patterson, D. (2003). Computer architecture: a
quantitative approach (Chapter 6 in particular). Morgan Kaufmann
(3rd ed.).
Next: Comparative Architectures
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Christine Northeast
Thu Sep 4 15:29:01 BST 2003