Distributed OS: Fall 2017

Course Outline

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

Assigned Readings

September 12 & 14, 2017

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"

September 19 & 21, 2017

• 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)

September 26 & 28, 2017

• 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)

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"