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

• Wikipedia article on Multics

The Early Internet:

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

UNIX

• The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive (1982), video
• Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson, "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" (1974)

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

Other Readings

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)

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.

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)

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)

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)

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)