Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 21:41:57 GMT Server: NCSA/1.5 Content-type: text/html BU CAS CS 552: Operating Systems---Home Page

BU CAS CS 552: Operating Systems--- Fall'96--- A. Heddaya

Home Page


[ As of 1996.11.17 ]
|| Syllabus || HW: #1 - #2 - #3 - #4 - #5 - #6 - #7 ||
Class meetings

MWF 9:00-10:00, in room GCF-209 (above Guitar Center)

Instructor

Abdelsalam `Solom' Heddaya (Office Hrs: WF 10-11:30 and by appointment).
heddaya@cs.bu.edu, MCS-271, x3-8922.

Grader

Arif Bhatti (no office hours).
tahir@cs.bu.edu

Notes

Useful Resources


Prerequisites

CAS CS 210 or ENG EK 412 or consent of instructor. What you need to know is available in selected readings from Mano's "Computer System Architecture (3rd ed.)".

Catalog description

Examines process synchronization; I/O techniques, buffering, file systems; processor scheduling; memory management; virtual memory; job scheduling, resource allocation; system modeling; and performance measurement and evaluation.

Course overview

Computer Science 552 offers an opportunity to learn about operating systems by designing and building various OS components, in addition to studying their conceptual and theoretical underpinnings. An operating system controls and operates disparate hardware resources so as to shield programs and users from idiosyncrasies of individual devices, and from such nasty phenomena as concurrency, asynchrony and failure. By hiding detailed hardware features and behaviors, the OS provides an interface that constitutes an abstraction of the hardware. In this course, we will study the design and construction of major subsystems of an operating system, and examine some of the core problems in detail. We will not focus on the difficulties of integrating the various subsystems into a coherent whole, as we might do if this were a project course. While these difficulties are critical for a complete understanding of operating systems, we would risk excluding issues of fundamental and current concern from the limited scope of attention available in a course. Therefore, the course will revolve around weekly and bi-weekly assignments, consisting of alternating design, implementation and analysis exercises.

Readings

[Tan 92]
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1992. Main textbook.

[Tan 95]
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Distributed Operating Systems, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1995. Some distributed computing issues.

Requirements

Credit for the course will be based on ~8 homework assignments (60%), and on midterm (15%) and final (25%) exams.

Homework Policy

Submission

Submit your homeworks at the beginning of class. Late homeworks go to the grader's mailbox or mailfolder in the CS Dept. main office (MCS 138).

Lateness

Homeworks are penalized 5% of the maximum grade per day of delay. Deadline extensions will be granted in cases of personal emergency, and if the needed amount of time is significantly underestimated. If you must, please request an extension as soon as you realize you need it.

Honor

We trust that you honor the notion of giving credit where credit is due: so, please acknowledge any sources you use in your course work. This requires proper citation of the source, and clear delineation of the material (e.g., code, algorithm, design idea, paraphrase, quotation, etc.) obtained from it.

Collaboration

I encourage you to collaborate in studying and on homeworks. To avoid gaining an unfair advantage (i.e., cheating or plagiarism) the rule is simple: produce the actual solution in isolation from others' work. That is, what you submit should be entirely your original expression, except for what you specifically credit to other sources. For example, copying without attribution any part, however small, of someone else's program constitutes plagiarism---even if you modify it, and even if the source is a textbook.

Standards of academic conduct treat cheating and plagiarism very seriously, because they impede the drive for originality and invention that have been the hallmark of human progress.


[ Created 1994.04 . Maintained by Abdelsalam Heddaya]