Distributed OS: Fall 2019

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"

Class Schedule & Readings

September 4, 2019 (in person)

None

September 9, 2019 (online)

The Early Internet:

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

September 11, 2019 (online)

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 16, 2019 (online)

The Alto:

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

September 18, 2019 (online)

Multics & UNIX:

• Wikipedia article on Multics
• Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson, "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" (1974)
• Richard Jensen, "Unix at 50: How the OS that powered smartphones started from failure" (2019, Ars Technica)

Optional: Browse around the Multicians website.

September 23, 2019 (online)

LOCUS & NFS

• Bruce Walker et al., "The LOCUS Distributed Operating System." (1983)
• Russel Sandberg et al., "Design and Implementation of the Sun Network Filesystem" (1985)

September 25, 2019 (online)

Remote Procedure Calls

• Bruce J. Nelson, "Remote Procedure Call" (1981) (Read the summary starting on p. 224, look at the Intro and Background if you have time.)
• Sun Microsystems, "RPC: Remote Procedure Call Protocol Specification" (1988)

September 30, 2019 (online)

Distributed Shared Memory

• Jelica Protic et al., "Distributed Shared Memory: Concepts and Systems" (1996)
• Kai Li, "Shared virtual memory on loosely coupled multiprocessors" (1986) (OPTIONAL)

October 2, 2019 (online)

Sprite, AFS, & Literature reviews

• John Ousterhout et al., "The Sprite Network Operating System" (1987)
• 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 7, 2019 (online)

Amoeba & Clouds

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

October 9, 2019 (online)

Plan 9 & Inferno (no group report)

• 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)
• Rob Pike and Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Styx Architecture for Distributed Systems"

Second half of class will be a review for the midterm.

October 16, 2019 (in person)

Mid-term exam (in class)

October 30, 2019 (online)

Project Proposal due.

Other readings

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)

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

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

• 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

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

• 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)

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

• 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)

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

"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