Distributed OS: Winter 2015

Course Outline

Here is the course outline. It should see only minor modifications during the semester.

Assigned Readings

January 12, 2015

The Early Internet:

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

The Alto:

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

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"

January 19, 2015

• Wikipedia article on Multics
• Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson, "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" (1974)
• Bruce Walker et al., "The LOCUS Distributed Operating System." (1983)
• Russel Sandberg et al., "Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem" (1985)
• John Ousterhout et al., "The Sprite Network Operating System" (1987)

January 26, 2015

• 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)
• John H. Howard et al., "Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System" (1988)

February 2, 2015

• Partha Dasgupta et al., "The Clouds Distributed Operating System" (1991) (continued from last class)
• Presotto et. al, Plan 9, A Distributed System (1991)
• Pike et al., Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995)
• Sanjay Ghemawat et al., "The Google File System" (SOSP 2003)

Read but no need for a response:

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

February 9, 2015

• John Kubiatowicz et al., "OceanStore: An Architecture for Global-Scale Persistent Storage" (2000)
• Sean Rhea et al., "Pond: the OceanStore Prototype" (2003)
• 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)

ALSO Present paper & topic to class for final project!

February 23, 2015

• Weil et al., Ceph: A Scalable, High-Performance Distributed File System (OSDI 2006).
• Burrows, The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems (OSDI 2006)

Other Readings

The Early Web

• Berners-Lee et al., "World-Wide Web: The Information Universe" (1992), pp. 52-58
• Alex Wright, "The Web That Wasn't" (2007), Google Tech Talk

Public Resource Computing

• Anderson et al., "SETI@home: An Experiment in Public-Resource Computing" (CACM 2002) (DOI) (Proxy)
• Anderson, "BOINC: A System for Public-Resource Computing and Storage" (Grid Computing 2004) (DOI) (Proxy)

Distributed Hash Tables

• Wikipedia's article on Distributed Hash Tables
• Zhao et al, "Tapestry: A Resilient Global-Scale Overlay for Service Deployment" (JSAC 2003)

Structured Data

• Chang et al., "BigTable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data" (OSDI 2006)
• DeCandia et al., "Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store" (SOSP 2007)
• Lakshman & Malik, "Cassandra - A Decentralized Structured Storage System" (LADIS 2009)
• Geambasu et al., "Comet: An active distributed key-value store" (OSDI 2010)

Specialized Storage

• Beaver et al., "Finding a needle in Haystack: Facebook’s photo storage" (OSDI 2010)

Computational Models

• Dean & Ghemawat, "MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters" (OSDI 2004)
• Murray et al., "Naiad: a timely dataflow system" (SOSP 2013)

Project Selection 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.

Notes

Date	Topic
Jan. 5	Session 1
Jan. 12	Session 2
Jan. 19	Session 3
Jan. 26	Session 4
Feb. 2	Session 5
Feb. 9	Session 6
Feb. 23	Session 7
Mar. 2	Session 8, Midterm (4 PM) and Proposal due
Mar. 9	Session 9
Mar. 16	Session 10
Mar. 23	Session 11
Mar. 30	Session 12
Apr. 6	Final Project Presentations
TBA	Final Exam