15-712 | Course Home Page and Overview

Overview| Readings| Summaries| Projects| Project Ideas| Homework & Exams

Overview
This course examines the design and analysis of selected aspects of operating systems and distributed systems. It covers topics such as concurrency and distributed communication; fault-tolerance, availability, and persistence; and operating system structure. Lecture focus on the principles used in the design of operating systems and distributed systems, and algorithms and data structures used in their implementation. Readings include case studies, seminal papers, and recent conference and journal articles.

For a basic impression of the kinds of things that we will cover, you can look at the Fall 2003 offering. Some of the topics and papers will change, but it will be quite similar.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

I am extending the deadline on submitting your 15-712 project report by one week. That is, instead of end of day Friday Apr 22 (Garth's rules for end of day), they will be due end of day Friday Apr 29 (Garth's rules again).

This does not change the dates of the project presentations. These are still Mon and Wed Apr 25 and 27. This means that while your write up can take longer, getting your results into a coherent story has been extended by at most a couple of days.

Since the prior rule for ordering these presentations is no longer effective, here is the order I am asking for:

Mon Apr 25

- Eric Chung, Jangwoo Kim, Eriko Nurvitadhi

- Alex Nizhner, Andrew Biggadike, Jad Chamcham

- Noam Zeilberger, Jeffrey Stylos, Srinath Sridhar

Wed Apr 27

- Terrence Wong, Raja Sambasivan, Gregg Economou

- Runting Shi, Matt Reid, Yong Lu

- Rahul Iyer, Amber Palekar

You may email me or bring on USB flash slides in PPT, PDF. If you bring your own laptop, you still need to give me the softcopy presentation. Also bring two printed copies, one for Hyang-Ah and one for me.

Each talk should be 17-20 mins long, practiced before hand. Q&A will extend it to about 25 mins per group. Talks should cover the problem/motivation, the idea/mechanism, experimental design, results, related work, conclusions and future work.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

If you don't have your midterm 1 returned to you, contact Garth to get it. Total possible points was 30. Grades are interpreted as follows: A+ is 26-30, A is 21-25, B is 16-20, C is 11-15.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

To make more time for the coming project deadline, there will be no lectures on Mon Apr 4 and Mon Apr 11.

Thursday, March 24, 2005

The second and final class midterm will be held on Monday April 18 in class, closed book, covering all material beginning with the Byzantine General's Problem through the end of the course.

There will be no class on Wed April 20.
The project report is due at the end of the week ending April 22 (Garth's submission rules).
The last two lectures, April 25 and 27, will be present used for presentations of the project materials. Standard duration presentations, 20 mins plus Q&A, three groups per day. Order of presentation will match the order of submission of the final report, as determined by Hyang-Ah receiving hardcopy or email.

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Today's class and project meetings are cancelled and rescheduled for Monday, March 21, 2005.

Wednesday, March 2, 2005

Project design doc is due this Friday, March 4 (before 9 am next school day).- 1-1 TA meeting schedule for this week

Monday, February 21, 2005

Project Literature survey is due this Friday Feb 25 (before 9 am Monday Feb 28).- No lecture this Wed Feb 23.- First exam is Monday Feb 28, in class. Material for the fist exam is up to but not including Byzantine Generals Problem.

Monday, January 31, 2005

You do not have to write summaries for the papers on Wednesday, February 2, 2005.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

According to the note from the President on Martin Luther King, Jr. day, of Jan 13, the university has canceled all classes scheduled after 12:30 pm on Monday Jan 17. This does not effect 15-712 as it is a morning class. We will have class as planned on Jan 17.
HW 0, due in class Jan 17, is available online as Word, text and pdf

Instructor: Garth Gibson office: WeH 8219 phone: x8-5890 office hours: W 1:30-2:30 email: garth@cs.cmu.edu	Teaching Assistant: Hyang-Ah Kim office: WeH 8121 phone: x8-3069 office hours: M 1:30-2:30 email: hakim@cs.cmu.edu	Course secretary: Margaret Weigand office: WeH 8124 phone: x8-2568 hours: M-F 7:30 - 4:00 email:weigand@cs.cmu.edu

Prerequisites

Members of this class are expected to have taken an operating systems course equivalent to CMU's 15-412 and achieved a grade of A or better. This includes familiarity as a user with an interactive operating system (e.g., Unix) and solid understanding of basic concepts in the design and implementation of operating systems. Students without this prerequisite knowledge are likely to struggle.

712 is a graduate-level class, and thus operates differently from an undergraduate class; particularly interested and prepared undergraduates can participate, with explicit permission of the instructor.