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"

October 3, 2018

Farsite & Oceanstore

• 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

Farsite & Plan 9

• 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)
• Presotto et. al, Plan 9, A Distributed System (1991)
• Pike et al., Plan 9 from Bell Labs (1995)

October 15, 2018

Test 1 review

October 17, 2018

Test 1