Distributed OS: Winter 2023

Course Outline

Here is the course outline.

Project Help

To develop a 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

January 9, 2023

Introduction

January 11, 2023

Designing a distributed operating system

January 16, 2023

The Early Internet & Multics:

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

Optional: Browse around the Multicians website.

January 18, 2023

UNIX

• Richard Jensen, "Unix at 50: How the OS that powered smartphones started from failure" (2019, Ars Technica)
• Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson, "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" (1974)
• The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive (1982), video

Note that the video covers the main points of the UNIX paper.

January 23, 2023

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"

The Alto:

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

January 25, 2023

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)

January 30, 2023

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)

February 1, 2023

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)

February 6, 2023

Sprite, AFS

• John Ousterhout et al., "The Sprite Network Operating System" (1987)
• John H. Howard et al., "Scale and Performance in a Distributed File System" (1988)

February 8, 2023

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"