Distributed OS: Fall 2018

Course Outline

Here is the course outline.

Project Help

To develop your literature review or research proposal, start with a single research paper that you find interesting and that is related to distributed operating systems in some way.

To begin selecting a paper, I suggest that you:

• search on Google Scholar using keywords relating to your interests, and/or
• browse the proceedings of major conferences that publish work related to distributed operating systems.

The main operating system conferences are OSDI and ACM SOSP (sosp.org,ACM DL). Note that not all the work here is on distributed operating systems! Also, many other conferences publish some work related to distributed operating systems, e.g. NSDI.

To help you write a literature review or the background of a research paper, read the following:

• Harvey, "What Is a Literature Review?" (DOC) (PPT)
• Taylor, "The Literature Review: A Few Tips On Conducting It"

Assigned Readings

September 10, 2018

The Early Internet:

• Robert E. Kahn, "Resource-Sharing Computer Communications Networks" (1972) (DOI)
• Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing (1972) - video

September 12, 2018

The Mother of All Demos:

• Doug Engelbart Institute, "Doug's 1968 Demo". You may want to focus on the highlights or the annotated clips.
• Wikipedia's page on "The Mother of all Demos"

September 17, 2018

The Alto:

• Thacker et al., "Alto: A Personal computer" (1979) (archive.org)

September 19, 2018

Multics & UNIX:

• Wikipedia article on Multics
• Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson, "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" (1974)

Optional: Browse around the Multicians website.

September 24, 2018

LOCUS & Sprite:

• Bruce Walker et al., "The LOCUS Distributed Operating System." (1983)
• John Ousterhout et al., "The Sprite Network Operating System" (1987)

September 26, 2018

V, Amoeba, Clouds:

• David R. Cheriton, "The V Distributed System." (1988)
• Andrew Tannenbaum et al., "The Amoeba System" (1990)
• Partha Dasgupta et al., "The Clouds Distributed Operating System" (1991)

October 1, 2018

NFS & AFS (+ Literature reviews)

• Russel Sandberg et al., "Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem" (1985)
• John H. Howard et al., "Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System" (1988)

• Harvey, "What Is a Literature Review?" (DOC) (PPT)
• Taylor, "The Literature Review: A Few Tips On Conducting It" (PDF)

October 3, 2018

Farsite & Oceanstore

• Atul Adya et al.,"FARSITE: Federated, Available, and Reliable Storage for an Incompletely Trusted Environment" (2002)
• William J. Bolosky et al., "The Farsite Project: A Retrospective" (2007)
• John Kubiatowicz et al., "OceanStore: An Architecture for Global-Scale Persistent Storage" (2000)
• Sean Rhea et al., "Pond: the OceanStore Prototype" (2003)

October 8, 2018

Thanksgiving!

October 10, 2018

Plan 9 & Inferno

• Presotto et. al, Plan 9, A Distributed System (1991)
• Pike et al., Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995)
• Doward et al., The Inferno Operating System (1997)
• Inferno OS website (browse)

October 15, 2018

Test 1 review

October 17, 2018

Test 1

October 29, 2018

• Weil et al., Ceph: A Scalable, High-Performance Distributed File System (OSDI 2006).
• Zhao et al, "Tapestry: A Resilient Global-Scale Overlay for Service Deployment" (JSAC 2003)

Background (optional but helpful):

• Wikipedia's article on Distributed Hash Tables
• Wikipedia's article on Kademlia
• Wikipedia's article on Tapestry

October 31, 2018

Project Proposal Due

• Sanjay Ghemawat et al., "The Google File System" (SOSP 2003)
• Burrows, The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems (OSDI 2006)

November 5, 2018

• Chang et al., "BigTable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data" (OSDI 2006)
• Corbett et al., "Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database" (OSDI 2012)

November 7, 2018

• Dean & Ghemawat, "MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters" (OSDI 2004)
• Martin Abadi et al., "TensorFlow: A System for Large-Scale Machine Learning" (OSDI 2016)

November 12, 2018

• DeCandia et al., "Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store" (SOSP 2007)
• Lakshman & Malik, "Cassandra - A Decentralized Structured Storage System" (LADIS 2009)

November 14, 2018

• Beaver et al., "Finding a needle in Haystack: Facebook’s photo storage" (OSDI 2010)
• Muralidhar et al., "f4: Facebook's Warm BLOB Storage System" (OSDI 2014)

November 19, 2018

• Anderson, "BOINC: A System for Public-Resource Computing and Storage" (Grid Computing 2004) (DOI) (Proxy)

November 21, 2018

Test 2

November 26, 2018

Containers & Orchestration

• Wikipedia, Operating-System-Level Virtualization
• Wikipedia article on Docker
• Burns et al., "Borg, Omega, and Kubernetes" (ACM Queue Jan/Feb 2016) (DOI)
• Openshift 3.11 Architecture

November 28, 2018

"Serverless Computing"

• Wikipedia article on Serverless Computing
• Wikipedia article on Google App Engine
• Wikipedia article on AWS Lambda
• Google App Engine
• AWS Lambda Developer Guide
• serverless documentation