15-712 Advanced and Distributed Operating Systems, Fall 2025

Latest Announcements

8/25: First day of class is Monday: Welcome to Fall 2025

Overview

15-712 is a PhD course in operating systems. The goals are:

To understand the state of the art in operating systems and distributed systems, and how and why we got there.
To understand how to engage in systems research.
To investigate novel ideas in systems through a semester-long research project.

Please note: This course is open to SCS Ph.D. students. Other students may be admitted by the permission of the instructor; please attend the first few sessions to see if you're interested. There will be a hard limit for the total number of students to ensure sufficient "face-time" for project meetings.

This course assumes a basic familiarity with operating sytems concepts. The course will consist of a reading/lecture/discussion component and a project component. The class will cover approximately 40 research papers. Some of these papers will introduce students to the basic principles on which modern operating systems and distributed systems are based. Others will cover more recent work to explore the state of the art and observe the evolution of these systems over time.

Students are expected to read papers before the class and participate in the discussion during the class.

Lecture time: MWF 12:30 - 13:50
Note: Class will meet on average two times per week. See the syllabus for the exact schedule.
Units: 12
Location: GHC4303

Course Staff

Instructors

Name	Email	Office	Tel	Office Hours
David Andersen	dga AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu	GHC 9109	-	By Appointment
Peter Steenkiste	prs AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu	GHC 9111	-	By Appointment

Teaching Assistant

Name	Email	Office	Tel	Office Hours
Nirjhar Mukherjee	nirjhar at cmu DOT edu	TBD	-	By Appointment

Course Secretary

Pat Loring sawako@cs.cmu.edu

Course Policies

Collaboration

Students are encouraged to talk to each other, to the course staff, or to anyone else about any of the assignments. Assistance must be limited to discussion of the problem and sketching general approaches to a solution. Each student must write out his or her own solutions to the homework.

Students MUST write paper summaries on their own. No AI or autocomplete use is permitted. Violating this policy will result in failing the course. The paper summaries are an integral part of working through the material: By writing your thoughts down after you read it, you exercise te neural pathways that remember information about the paper. The summaries are part of the learning process.

Late Policy

The deadline for any assignment can be extended with a 10% penalty per day.
No deadline can be extended by more than two days. Assignments will NOT be accepted 48 hours after the due date.
The project presentations must be given on the day they are scheduled.
If you are ill on a deadline: Contact the instructor and get a medical note.
This is a graduate-level course: All policies can be flexible (except the no AI on summaries one). Stay in touch with the course staff.